feat(home-assistant): add ha-pg for the recorder (phase 1, empty cluster) #521

Merged
k.renner merged 1 commits from feat-ha-recorder-postgres into master 2026-08-19 13:24:33 +00:00
8 changed files with 404 additions and 0 deletions
@@ -0,0 +1,123 @@
# Home Assistant recorder: SQLite → Postgres
## Why
The recorder's SQLite database is the single largest client writer in the
cluster. Measured 2026-08-19 (cgroup `io.stat` on the home-assistant container,
corroborated by kernel diskstats and Ceph pool counters):
| | |
|---|---|
| HA writes to its RBD volume | **40 GB/day** |
| share of all client writes | **~26%** |
| actual row data underneath | **~5 GB/day** |
The 8× gap is the write *pattern*, not the volume:
```
~30 state changes/sec (107k rows/hour, 2.57M/day)
×2 SQLite WAL + checkpoint — every dirtied page written twice
×4 ext4 journal + commit, because synchronous=FULL fsyncs every commit
(measured: 819 KB of 4 KiB writes → 3.28 MB at the block device)
= ~15 KB written per recorded state change
```
Postgres replaces scattered fsync'd page rewrites with sequential batched WAL.
This attacks the multiplier rather than trimming what gets recorded — excluding
entities would hide the problem, not fix it.
**Context:** this is one of three write-reduction changes. The other two are
merged and verified — `size 3→2` on the Ceph pools (#519) and
`mon_compact_on_trim=false` (#520, which alone removed ~228 GB/day). See #434.
## What is at risk
`states` is disposable — `purge_keep_days: 7`, so it regenerates in a week.
**`statistics` is not.** As of 2026-08-19:
| table | rows | note |
|---|---|---|
| `statistics` | 10,793,712 | **spans 2024-03-13 → today, 2.4 years** |
| `statistics_short_term` | 1,902,624 | 5-minute buckets |
| `statistics_meta` | 1,448 | entity ↔ id mapping, required by both |
| `states` | 18,289,190 | disposable, 7-day retention |
| `events` | 483,989 | disposable |
**Home Assistant does not migrate data between database engines.** Repointing
`db_url` at an empty Postgres silently starts from zero and the energy dashboard
loses its entire history. The long-term statistics are irreplaceable — they are
not in InfluxDB, which HA does not read for the energy dashboard.
## Phase 1 — deploy the cluster (this PR)
`ha-pg` comes up **empty** and nothing consumes it. HA stays on SQLite, so a
failure here is inert and there is nothing to roll back.
Verify before going further:
```sh
kubectl -n home-assistant get cluster ha-pg # Cluster in healthy state, 1/1
kubectl -n home-assistant get backup # ha-pg-daily Completed (immediate: true)
kubectl -n home-assistant logs ha-pg-1 -c postgres | grep -i archive # WAL archiving, no errors
```
Confirm the backup actually landed in the bucket rather than trusting the CR
status — the WordPress backup failed nightly for three days against a bucket
that was declared but never created (see `opentofu/object_storage.tf`).
## Phase 2 — migrate the data (NOT in this PR)
Do not start until phase 1 is verified.
**Migrate statistics only.** Copying all 18M `states` rows is slow, needs a long
HA outage, and buys a table that is discarded within 7 days anyway.
1. **Snapshot first.** Velero backup of the HA PVC, plus a `.backup` copy of
`home-assistant_v2.db`. This is the rollback.
2. **Stop the recorder** — scale `deploy/home-assistant` to 0. The database must
be quiescent; copying a live SQLite file gives a torn read.
3. **Create the schema.** Start HA once against the empty Postgres so it runs
its own migrations. Never hand-create the tables — the schema version must
match the HA version exactly or HA will refuse to start or silently migrate.
4. **Copy** `statistics_meta` → `statistics` → `statistics_short_term`, in that
order (the other two carry `metadata_id` foreign keys into the first).
Sequences must be reset afterwards, or the first insert collides on a
duplicate primary key:
```sql
SELECT setval('statistics_id_seq', (SELECT MAX(id) FROM statistics));
SELECT setval('statistics_meta_id_seq', (SELECT MAX(id) FROM statistics_meta));
SELECT setval('statistics_short_term_id_seq', (SELECT MAX(id) FROM statistics_short_term));
```
5. **Repoint** `recorder.db_url` in the `homeassistant` repo — that change lives
there, not here:
```yaml
recorder:
db_url: !secret recorder_db_url # postgresql://homeassistant:<pw>@ha-pg-rw.home-assistant.svc.cluster.local/homeassistant
```
The password is in the CNPG-generated `ha-pg-app` Secret. It must not be
committed — render it into `secrets.yaml` the same way the Z2M MQTT password
is handled in `zigbee2mqtt-deployment.yaml`.
6. **Verify** the energy dashboard renders history back to 2024, not just today.
That is the check that proves the statistics migration worked; "HA starts and
records" does not.
### Rollback
Revert `db_url` to the SQLite path and restore the `.backup` copy. Keep the
SQLite file until the energy dashboard has been confirmed over a full day —
deleting it early removes the only rollback that preserves the 2.4 years.
## After the migration
- The HA config PVC shrinks from 5.5 GB to a few hundred MB. Do not shrink the
PVC itself: `ceph-block` allows expansion, not reduction.
- Re-measure. `kubectl -n home-assistant exec deploy/home-assistant -c
home-assistant -- cat /sys/fs/cgroup/io.stat` was 40 GB/day before. If it does
not drop substantially, the migration did not achieve its purpose and that
should be recorded rather than assumed.
- `synchronous_commit: off` in `ha-pg-cluster.yaml` is the single biggest
contributor to the reduction. It is safe for telemetry (Postgres stays crash
consistent; at most a few hundred ms of commits are lost on unclean shutdown)
but it is a deliberate trade and should not be "corrected" later without
understanding why it is set.
@@ -0,0 +1,90 @@
---
# Postgres backend for the Home Assistant recorder.
#
# WHY THIS EXISTS
# The recorder's SQLite database is the single largest client writer in the
# cluster. Measured 2026-08-19 (cgroup io.stat on the home-assistant container,
# corroborated by kernel diskstats): 40 GB/day to its RBD volume, ~26% of all
# client writes, against only ~5 GB/day of actual row data. The gap is the write
# PATTERN, not the volume:
#
# ~30 state changes/sec (107k rows/hour, 2.57M/day)
# x2 SQLite WAL + checkpoint — every dirtied page is written twice
# x4 ext4 journal + commit, because synchronous=FULL fsyncs every commit
# (measured: 819 KB of 4 KiB writes -> 3.28 MB at the block device)
# = ~15 KB written per recorded state change
#
# Postgres replaces scattered fsync'd page rewrites with sequential, batched WAL.
# That is the point of the move — it attacks the multiplier rather than trimming
# what gets recorded, which would only hide the problem.
#
# STAGING
# Phase 1 (this manifest): the cluster comes up EMPTY and HA keeps using SQLite.
# Nothing depends on it, so a failure here is inert. Verify Ready, WAL archiving
# to Hetzner, and a successful base backup before going further.
# Phase 2: migrate the statistics tables and repoint recorder.db_url.
# See MIGRATION-recorder-postgres.md for the sequence and the rollback.
apiVersion: postgresql.cnpg.io/v1
kind: Cluster
metadata:
name: ha-pg
namespace: home-assistant
spec:
instances: 1
imageName: ghcr.io/cloudnative-pg/postgresql:16
storage:
storageClass: ceph-block
# Sized for the migrated statistics plus 7 days of states at the current
# rate: statistics 10.8M rows + statistics_short_term 1.9M (~1.8 GB with
# indexes in Postgres) and ~18M states rows for the purge_keep_days:7 window
# (~4 GB). 20Gi leaves room for autovacuum bloat and index churn.
# ceph-block has allowVolumeExpansion: true, so this can grow in place.
size: 20Gi
plugins:
- name: barman-cloud.cloudnative-pg.io
isWALArchiver: true
parameters:
barmanObjectName: ha-pg-store
bootstrap:
initdb:
# Explicit, not left to CNPG's `app` default: the generated ha-pg-app
# Secret and the -app Service point at whatever is named here, and the
# recorder db_url in phase 2 must match. Same trap that made the wp-pg
# namespace migration point credentials at an empty database (#433).
database: homeassistant
owner: homeassistant
postgresql:
parameters:
shared_buffers: "256MB"
max_connections: "50"
# The rest of this block is tuned to MINIMISE WRITE VOLUME, which is the
# entire reason for the migration. Defaults would give a correct database
# that writes far more than it needs to on replicated Ceph storage.
#
# synchronous_commit off: the recorder is telemetry, not transactional
# record-keeping. This does NOT risk corruption — Postgres stays crash
# consistent; it only means the last few hundred ms of commits can be lost
# on an unclean shutdown, which for state history is a non-event. In
# exchange every commit stops forcing an fsync, which is precisely the
# cost that makes SQLite expensive here.
synchronous_commit: "off"
# Compress full-page images in WAL. Recorder writes are many small row
# inserts scattered across pages, so full-page writes after each
# checkpoint dominate WAL volume; compression cuts that directly.
wal_compression: "on"
# Fewer checkpoints => fewer full-page writes, since a page is only
# fully-logged on its first modification after a checkpoint. 15min with a
# 2GB ceiling keeps recovery time sane while cutting repeat full-page
# images for the hot rows the recorder rewrites constantly.
checkpoint_timeout: "15min"
max_wal_size: "2GB"
min_wal_size: "512MB"
# full_page_writes is deliberately LEFT ON (the default). RBD can tear a
# page across a 4 MiB object boundary, and turning this off would trade
# write volume for the risk of an unrecoverable database. Not worth it.
resources:
requests:
cpu: 200m
memory: 512Mi
limits:
memory: 1Gi
@@ -0,0 +1,38 @@
---
# Barman S3 credentials for ha-pg.
#
# FOLLOW-UP (#397): sourced from seed/paperless/hetzner-creds, which is not where
# they belong. woodpecker/hetzner-creds-externalsecret.yaml has the identical
# problem and the same note. The values are the same today, so this is correct
# but coupled: rotating paperless's Hetzner credentials would silently change
# the backup credentials for Home Assistant and Woodpecker too.
#
# The fix is one dedicated path per consumer (seed/home-assistant/hetzner-creds)
# and a one-line change to the `key:` below. Creating it needs an OpenBao write:
#
# bao kv put homelab/seed/home-assistant/hetzner-creds \
# @<(bao kv get -format=json homelab/seed/paperless/hetzner-creds | jq '.data.data')
#
# Note the mount is `homelab`, so the path is homelab/seed/... — #397 records a
# 403 on `bao kv list seed`, which was a wrong-path error rather than a
# permissions problem.
#
# The namespace allowlist on the openbao ClusterSecretStore
# (infrastructure/post-crds/openbao-clustersecretstore.yaml) must include this
# namespace or ESO silently never syncs (#505). home-assistant is already
# allowlisted — it has several ExternalSecrets in this directory already.
apiVersion: external-secrets.io/v1
kind: ExternalSecret
metadata:
name: hetzner-s3-creds
namespace: home-assistant
spec:
refreshInterval: 1h
secretStoreRef:
kind: ClusterSecretStore
name: openbao
target:
name: hetzner-s3-creds
dataFrom:
- extract:
key: seed/paperless/hetzner-creds
@@ -0,0 +1,35 @@
---
# Barman object store for ha-pg: base backups + continuous WAL archiving to
# Hetzner Object Storage, same target bucket as the other CNPG clusters.
#
# Its own prefix. Two clusters archiving WAL to one destinationPath interleave
# their streams and corrupt both — see the note in
# kubernetes/apps/woodpecker/objectstore.yaml, which learned that the hard way.
apiVersion: barmancloud.cnpg.io/v1
kind: ObjectStore
metadata:
name: ha-pg-store
namespace: home-assistant
spec:
configuration:
destinationPath: s3://renner-uno-k8s-cnpg/ha-pg
endpointURL: https://fsn1.your-objectstorage.com
s3Credentials:
accessKeyId:
name: hetzner-s3-creds
key: ACCESS_KEY_ID
secretAccessKey:
name: hetzner-s3-creds
key: ACCESS_SECRET_KEY
region:
name: hetzner-s3-creds
key: REGION
wal:
compression: gzip
data:
compression: gzip
# Matches the 30d retention the other CNPG clusters use and the
# renner-uno-k8s-cnpg bucket's noncurrent-version expiry in
# opentofu/object_storage.tf, so old S3 versions don't outlive the backups
# that superseded them.
retentionPolicy: "30d"
@@ -0,0 +1,23 @@
---
# Daily base backups for ha-pg. Continuous WAL archiving runs separately
# (ha-pg-cluster.yaml spec.plugins[].isWALArchiver); without periodic base
# backups the prefix would have no recovery point of its own, and
# ha-pg-store's retentionPolicy: 30d would have nothing to prune against, so the
# WAL chain would grow without bound.
#
# 02:50 UTC, offset from the other CNPG clusters (02:30, wp-pg at 02:40) so they
# do not all hit the Hetzner bucket at once.
apiVersion: postgresql.cnpg.io/v1
kind: ScheduledBackup
metadata:
name: ha-pg-daily
namespace: home-assistant
spec:
schedule: "0 50 2 * * *"
immediate: true
backupOwnerReference: self
cluster:
name: ha-pg
method: plugin
pluginConfiguration:
name: barman-cloud.cloudnative-pg.io
@@ -52,6 +52,14 @@ resources:
# CNP ingress rule.
- zigbee2mqtt-gate-service.yaml
- zigbee2mqtt-ingress.yaml
# Postgres backend for the recorder (MIGRATION-recorder-postgres.md).
# PHASE 1: this cluster comes up EMPTY and nothing consumes it — HA is still
# on SQLite. Deploying it is therefore inert; phase 2 migrates the statistics
# tables and repoints recorder.db_url in the homeassistant repo.
- ha-pg-hetzner-creds-externalsecret.yaml
- ha-pg-objectstore.yaml
- ha-pg-cluster.yaml
- ha-pg-scheduled-backup.yaml
configMapGenerator:
# nginx config for the reverse-proxy sidecar. Hash suffix disabled so
# the cm name stays stable; editing proxy.conf does not auto-roll the
@@ -99,3 +99,26 @@ spec:
interval: 30s
podTargetLabels:
- role
---
# ha-pg — Postgres backend for the Home Assistant recorder
# (kubernetes/apps/home-assistant/ha-pg-cluster.yaml). Added with the cluster
# rather than after it, so the migration has metrics from the first moment
# instead of discovering the gap later, which is how wp-pg's scrape hole was
# found (#433).
apiVersion: monitoring.coreos.com/v1
kind: PodMonitor
metadata:
name: cnpg-ha-pg
namespace: home-assistant
labels:
app.kubernetes.io/name: cloudnative-pg
release: kube-prometheus-stack
spec:
selector:
matchLabels:
cnpg.io/cluster: ha-pg
podMetricsEndpoints:
- port: metrics
interval: 30s
podTargetLabels:
- role
@@ -358,3 +358,67 @@ spec:
- ports:
- port: "8123"
protocol: TCP
---
# ha-pg (CNPG) — instance-manager access for the CloudNativePG operator.
#
# DEDICATED policy with its own endpointSelector, NOT another rule on the
# namespace-wide default-deny above. That policy has endpointSelector:{}, so any
# rule added there applies to EVERY pod in the namespace — and :8000 is served
# both by the CNPG instance manager and by other workloads, so a namespace-wide
# :8000 grant would expose far more than intended. Same reasoning as
# wp-pg-allow-cnpg-operator in woodpecker-ns.yaml, which was corrected during
# review for exactly this (#433).
apiVersion: cilium.io/v2
kind: CiliumNetworkPolicy
metadata:
name: ha-pg-allow-cnpg-operator
namespace: home-assistant
spec:
endpointSelector:
matchLabels:
cnpg.io/cluster: ha-pg
ingress:
- fromEndpoints:
- matchLabels:
"k8s:io.kubernetes.pod.namespace": database
app.kubernetes.io/name: cloudnative-pg
toPorts:
- ports:
- port: "8000"
protocol: TCP
# ICMP to the ha-pg pods. REQUIRED because the L4 rules in this policy
# select those endpoints, and Cilium drops ICMP to an endpoint selected by
# any layer 4 policy unless the traffic is CT-related. Without this, PMTUD
# Destination Unreachable / Packet Too Big toward ha-pg are dropped
# silently, and the symptom is stalled transfers rather than a policy
# denial — the failure mode documented in woodpecker-ns.yaml.
- fromEntities:
- cluster
icmps:
- fields:
- { type: 3, family: IPv4 } # Destination Unreachable — PMTUD
- { type: 1, family: IPv6 } # Destination Unreachable
- { type: 2, family: IPv6 } # Packet Too Big — PMTUD, mandatory
---
# ha-pg — Postgres access for the Home Assistant recorder.
#
# Scoped to the HA pod on both ends: only home-assistant reaches ha-pg, and only
# on 5432. Nothing else in this namespace has any business in the recorder
# database.
apiVersion: cilium.io/v2
kind: CiliumNetworkPolicy
metadata:
name: ha-pg-allow-home-assistant
namespace: home-assistant
spec:
endpointSelector:
matchLabels:
cnpg.io/cluster: ha-pg
ingress:
- fromEndpoints:
- matchLabels:
app.kubernetes.io/name: home-assistant
toPorts:
- ports:
- port: "5432"
protocol: TCP