This blog is co-authored by Lizzy Nguyen, Adam Wright, and Kim Kaluba.
In today’s digital-first economy, the speed and reliability of your IT infrastructure directly determine your business agility. Automated platforms are critical solutions that enable businesses to streamline operations and increase efficiency by automating repetitive, rule-based, and often complex tasks. Many organizations leverage Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) to operationalize automation at scale: turning individual tasks into a governed, secure, and repeatable enterprise-wide strategy. But for mission-critical automation, relying on a robust foundation isn't just a best practice—it's non-negotiable.
The core principle of resilience begins with the database and that is where EDB is the game changer. For an enterprise, High Availability (HA) at the database layer is a critical safety net. Why? Because if the backend database goes down, entire operations can grind to a halt. No new jobs can start, and no vital logs are recorded.
EDB is proud to announce a powerful joint solution between Red Hat and EDB. Together we provide a resilient automation solution so our customers can automate the deployment of production-ready PostgreSQL clusters with enterprise-grade high availability and failover capabilities for AAP. Leveraging EDB’s 20-year history of providing commercial support and high availability solutions for Postgres, this solution enables AAP users to operationalize automation at scale, with resilience and sovereignty built in from the start.
Why EDB Postgres AI and Red Hat AAP?
Together, Red Hat and EDB deliver continuous Postgres availability to the heart of your automation platform This solution combines the power of EDB Postgres AI’s core capabilities to work seamlessly with Red Hat AAP, delivering a fully tested, validated, and reliable foundation for your mission-critical automation so you can realize:
High availability and failover management: The core component that monitors the database cluster and automatically handles failure detection and switchover.
Disaster recovery: Enables full and incremental backups, ensuring point-in-time recovery (PITR) to minimize data loss and support recovery from critical failure scenarios.
Automated deployment: Powered by Ansible this automation tool deploys and configures the entire production-ready HA cluster following EDB’s proven best practices.
Eliminate the hassle of setting up a production-ready PostgreSQL backend for Red Hat AAP, leveraging a solution that is thoroughly tested and automatically deployed, empowering you to gain the confidence of a mission-critical approach to your open source strategy. You have the freedom to choose both open source PostgreSQL (community edition) and enterprise-grade EDB Postgres AI Database servers, depending on your workload needs. This is all supported jointly by the industry-leading experts at EDB and Red Hat, ensuring resilience, continuous availability, and flexibility across your environment.
How does it work?
Business continuity hinges on a reliable database, and that's why an externalized architecture is the enterprise standard for Red Hat AAP. By running the automation controller against an external EDB Postgres AI database, you instantly gain access to the enterprise-grade high availability and disaster recovery capabilities that are imperative to mission-critical systems running Postgres. This provides a dedicated, clustered database infrastructure to ensure an always-on, never-fail environment with:
Resilience: If the automation controller node fails, the data remains safe on the external database. It immediately resumes operations by spinning up a new controller node and pointing it to the external database.
Active-Passive Replication: This solution meets stringent enterprise HA standards for the Postgres backend in AAP. This includes a Primary Node (Active) that handles all read/write operations, a Standby Node (Passive) that continuously receives data via replication, and Automated Failover. If the Primary crashes, the system promotes the Standby to the new Primary, ensuring the automation platform's "brain" remains accessible and the business continues to function.
Real-world impact
This configuration is tested and trusted by EDBs and Red Hat experts to implement high-availability replication, reliable disaster-recovery backups, and protection against replication pitfalls. By automating the deployment of this architecture, your Postgres backend is always production-ready and optimized for resilience. Now, your enterprise can benefit from:
Automated High Availability: EDB Postgres AI monitors cluster health, handles automatic failover and failback, and manages Virtual IP, ensuring continuous database availability.
Simplified Deployment: You can use familiar, Ansible-based tools to automate provisioning of the entire database cluster, including the operating system, PostgreSQL, and failover management, using predefined, validated reference architectures.
Flexibility and Choice: Leverage both open source PostgreSQL and EDB Postgres AI Database servers, giving you the flexibility to choose your preferred database.
Best-in-Class Support: Enterprise-grade support jointly provided by Red Hat and EDB, means you have a trusted path to fast resolution for any issue, spanning both the automation platform and its mission-critical database backend.
The future of data and AI is resilient and automated
Now, the true power of automation lies not just in the ability to execute tasks, but in its reliability when managing your most critical IT infrastructure. EDB Postgres AI and Red Hat deliver the peace of mind that your critical automation processes won’t be interrupted. With validated, repeatable deployment patterns and automated failover, you move beyond basic uptime to unparalleled resiliency by delivering continuous availability for the mission-critical database that drives your entire automation strategy.
Ready to fail-proof your automations? To learn more about how EDB Postgres AI enables high availability with automated failover, please refer to EDB’s documentation or contact us.