Built-in High Availability (BiHA) is a complex Postgres Pro Shardman solution that aims to provide high availability and is mostly managed by shardmanctl and shardmand. Every shard in the distributed system is by default a BiHA cluster — a cluster with physical replication and built-in failover, high availability, and automatic node failure recovery.
As compared to existing cluster solutions, i.e. a standard PostgreSQL primary-standby cluster, the BiHA cluster offers the following benefits:
Physical replication.
Dedicated leader node available for read and write transactions and follower nodes.
Built-in failover including capabilities of automatic node failure detection, response, and subsequent cluster reconfiguration by means of elections.
Referee node in the referee_with_wal mode to avoid split-brain issues.
Manual switchover.
Autorewind capabilities.
Synchronous node replication.