Multiple server instance load and database balancing

Question

Please correct me if I am wrong but I guess handling more requests and load by adding more machines or balancing the load between multiple servers is horizontal scaling. So, if I add more servers, how do I distribute the database? Do I create only one database to hold the user records with multiple servers? Or do I split the database too? Then what about database integrity? How to synchronize it? I am a newbie and really confused but eager to learn. I would like to use postgresql for my project and would like to know some basic things before I start. What I want to do is, create two servers for the application load balancing (please correct me if its not what I have to do). How will I manage the database across these without database integrity? Do I have to replicate the data within the two servers? How do you guyz have multiple instance and manage database? Do I need to go through sharding for this? What would be the best approach to have many instance without database integrity in accordance to postgresql. I would really appreciate if anyone could explain it to me. Thank you!

Answer 1

Not sure if you are looking just for a service, which could bring you what you need so you don't have to spend time on it, or if on the other hand, you would like to implement that on your end, which I guess could be quite complex.

If you are looking for your own solution, maybe you should take a look at Postgres-XC, which is a group that provides a database cluster based upon PostgreSQL database.

On the other hand, if you are just interested in the development process and don't want to spend time on this when you can have it on the cloud, maybe you would like to take a look at EnterpriseDB which provides PostgreSQL on the cloud.

For your application, you can also use a cloud service in which you can even auto-scale your app depending on some parameters as it is explained here.