# Pause/Resume mode for the cluster

## The goal

Under certain circumstances Patroni needs to temporary step down from managing the cluster, while still retaining the cluster state in DCS. Possible use cases are uncommon activities on the cluster, such as major version upgrades or corruption recovery. During those activities nodes are often started and stopped for the reason unknown to Patroni, some nodes can be even temporary promoted, violating the assumption of running only one master. Therefore, Patroni needs to be able to “detach” from the running cluster, implementing an equivalent of the maintenance mode in Pacemaker.

## The implementation

When Patroni runs in a paused mode, it does not change the state of PostgreSQL, except for the following cases:

- For each node, the member key in DCS is updated with the current information about the cluster. This causes Patroni to run read-only queries on a member node if the member is running.
- For the Postgres master with the leader lock Patroni updates the lock. If the node with the leader lock stops being the master (i.e. is demoted manually), Patroni will release the lock instead of promoting the node back.
- Manual unscheduled restart, reinitialize and manual failover are allowed. Manual failover is only allowed if the node to failover to is specified. In the paused mode, manual failover does not require a running master node.
- If ‘parallel’ masters are detected by Patroni, it emits a warning, but does not demote the masters without the leader lock.
- If there is no leader lock in the cluster, the running master acquires the lock. If there is more than one master node, then the first master to acquire the lock wins. If there are no masters altogether, Patroni does not try to promote any replicas. There is an exception in this rule: if there is no leader lock because the old master has demoted itself due to the manual promotion, then only the candidate node mentioned in the promotion request may take the leader lock. When the new leader lock is granted (i.e. after promoting a replica manually), Patroni makes sure the replicas that were streaming from the previous leader will switch to the new one.
- When Postgres is stopped, Patroni does not try to start it. When Patroni is stopped, it does not to stop Postgres instance it is managing.

## User guide

`patronictl` supports `pause` and `resume` commands.

One can also issue a `PATCH` request to the `{namespace}/{cluster}/config` key with `{"pause": true/false/null}`