Elephant Shed Archives - credativ®

This week version 1.3 of our PostgreSQL® appliance Elephant Shed was released.

The highlight of the new version is support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and CentOS 7. As is already the case for Debian, the appliance heavily relies on the postgresql-common infrastructure which was previously ported to RPM.
The well-known PostgreSQL® RPM packages from yum.postgresql.org are integrated into the system via pg_createcluster and can be administrated from the Elephant Shed web interface.

All other Elephant Shed components like pgAdmin4, Grafana, Prometheus, pgbackrest, Cockpit or shellinabox work in the same way as in the Debian version of the appliance. Only the SELinux functionality has to be deactivated in order to run pgAdmin4 and shellinabox as their packages do not support this.

Besides the port to RPM the appliance infrastructure was updated. The Prometheus node-exporter is now available in version 0.16 in which many metric names were adjusted to the Prometheus naming scheme. The Grafana dashboard was updated accordingly. The Apache configuration was switched from authnz_pam to authnz_external as the former is not available on CentOS and stable functionality could not longer be guaranteed on Debian Buster.

The next items on the Elephant-Shed roadmap are the integration of the REST-API in order to control particular components, as well as multi-host support so that several Elephant-Shed instances can be controlled simultaneously.
An overhaul of the user interface is planned as well.

The updated packages are available for download at packages.credativ.com. If Elephant-Shed was installed already, the updates are provided via apt as usual.

The open-source PostgreSQL® appliance Elephant-Shed is developed by credativ and is increasingly popular, as the most important compontents for the administration of PostgreSQL® servers are already included. Adjustments and extensions can be done at any time.

Comprehensible technical support for Elephant-Shed is offered by credativ including guaranteed service-level agreements and optional 365 days and 24/7 hours.

The credativ PostgreSQL® Competence Center has released a project roadmap for the PostgreSQL® Appliance Elephant Shed.

Elephant Shed is a freely available PostgreSQL® solution developed by credativ, which combines management, monitoring and administration into one system.

The project roadmap for 2018 includes following points:

An additional planned feature is the implementation of REST API to control individual components. REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer and is an application programming interface based on the behavior of the World Wide Web. Specifically the PostgreSQL® database and the backup via pgBackRest should be addressed.

Multi host support is also planned. A central control of several Elephant Shed instances is thus possible.

In order to make Elephant Shed even more user friendly, various configuration parameters of the web interface are going to be adjusted.

The project roadmap is of course also constantly being worked on. On GitHub you can leave us your feedback at any time.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all users and testers, and look forward to further development of the project!

For further information please visit elephant-shed.io and GitHub.

This article was originally written by Philip Haas

Elephant Shed is now available as a Vagrant box. This makes it very easy to test and try out the PostgreSQL® appliance.

Vagrant is an Open Source tool for creating portable virtual software environments. By being fully script controlled Vagrant makes it easy to generate virtual machines, in which a software component is installed for testing purposes. Vagrant itself is only the manager, whereas various backends such as Virtualbox or cloud providers can be used for the actual virtualization.

For the development of Elephant Shed we have relied on Vagrant from the very beginning. This “box” is now also available in the Vagrant Cloud.

To use this box Vagrant and VirtualBox must be installed. The host operating system hereby is irrelevant (Linux/MacOS/Windows), but inside the box runs Debian Stretch. The box is then automatically downloaded.

vagrant init credativ/elephant-shed
vagrant up

This creates a virtual machine where Elephant Shed runs in a VirtualBox on your computer.

We are looking forward to your feedback!

Further information can be found on our Elephant Shed project page and on Github as well.

The credativ PostgreSQL® Appliance is now available for download as a completely free Open Source solution. The new appliance called ‘Elephant Shed PostgreSQL® Appliance‘ offers a tremendous ease of use for enterprise PostgreSQL® operations. The long-term maintenance of the appliance will be handled by the PostgreSQL® experts of credativ. Prepared images for the major cloud and virtualization platforms are already in work and will be released soon for VMWare, Virtualbox, Vagrant and for the cloud platforms Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform.

Elephant Shed builds on proven components, which are published exclusively under recognized Open Source licenses. These tools are an effective support for the management of a PostgreSQL® server. All components used are pre-installed and integrated into the integral automation system. The majority of these tools can be used via a comfortable web interface.

Service and Support

For Elephant Shed, credativ offers comprehensive technical support with guaranteed service level agreements, which is also available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Support during installation and integration, as well as an introduction to Elephant Shed is of course also part of credativ’s services.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about Elephant Shed and our service and support services.

For more information, please visit our Elephant Shed- project page and Github.

This article was originally written by Philip Haas.