Speaker Interview: Jimmy Angelakos

Deploying PostgreSQL on Kubernetes   Sunday 13:00   Devroom

Twitter: @vyruss GitHub: vyruss LinkedIn: vyruss Company website: solarwindsmsp.com Website: computing.vyruss.org

Could you briefly introduce yourself?

My name is Jimmy Angelakos, I have worked with Open Source tools for more than 20 years and been using PostgreSQL exclusively for a decade. In the past I have taught databases & programming, designed transaction processing, interoperability & transport solutions for a SME, worked for EDINA at the University of Edinburgh as Technical Lead for the OSS project DMPonline.dcc.ac.uk. I am currently Platform Architect at SolarWinds MSP.

How do you engage with the PostgreSQL Community?

I am a member of PostgreSQL Europe and make an effort to participate in as many PostgreSQL-related activities as I can in Europe. I am also active on Twitter, where I can engage with the community, share interesting tidbits and promote Postgres. I enjoy discussing with fellow Postgres users and discovering how stunningly varied their use cases are for this project.

Have you enjoyed previous pgconf.eu or FOSDEM conferences, either as attendee or as speaker?

I have attended FOSDEM religiously since 2010 and I believe it is the foremost FOSS event in Europe, the mixture of different subjects and the level of the talks is simply unmatched. I have also attended PGConf.EU three times and was again impressed by the content and amount of useful information which is available there. This is the third time I’ll be speaking at FOSDEM and I’m always impressed by the audience participation and interest even in out-there subjects but also by the interesting hallway conversations you can have there!

What will your talk be about, exactly? Why this topic?

It’s going to be about exploring the various ways which are available to deploy and get started with PostgreSQL on Kubernetes. Many organisations are beginning to explore the area of cloud-native architectures, and currently Kubernetes appears to be the most popular enterprise-grade orchestration solution. I believe the move to bring PostgreSQL into the cloud-native world absolutely makes sense and will make it easier for people to adopt without having to rely on cloud database vendors.

What is the audience for your talk?

I am guessing an intermediate-level technical crowd who are interested in this radical new direction of systems architecture, but are perhaps wary of all the new concepts and jargon. And those long-suffering DevOps and DBA people perhaps :)

What existing knowledge should the attendee have?

I will assume that the audience has elementary knowledge of cloud concepts and the capabilities of PostgreSQL, but we will go over the bare basics at the start of the talk anyway.

What is the one feature in PostgreSQL 11 which you like most?

I am impressed by the partitioning improvements, which take big-data usage of PostgreSQL to a new level. If I can diverge a bit and say which other feature I like that was introduced in a previous release, it’s logical replication which gives you immense flexibility for systems design.

Which feature would you like to see in PostgreSQL?

I would like to see more features from pglogical brought into the codebase, such as the capability to replicate DDL commands.

FOSDEM is a very large conference. Are there any other talks you want to see? Where will people usually find you?

I will attempt to cram myself into the Python, Data Science, Go or Infra Management devrooms where I can hopefully catch some of the talks. Regardless, I will definitely be at FOSDEM PGDay on Friday and hovering around the PostgreSQL devroom on Sunday.