I'm using docker swarm and was hoping to use these containers https://github.com/bitnami/bitnami-docker-pgpool and https://github.com/bitnami/bitnami-docker-postgresql-repmgr.
For postgres, I'm going to configure 3 different services and repmgr would elect the master and go about it's business of ensuring that stream replication is setup for hot standby.
Now what I wanted to do was create one service with pgpool. I want this to be highly available though and I've been reading about that in it's documentation https://www.pgpool.net/docs/latest/en/html/example-cluster.html. Apparently it requires that only one node be 'active' and the others be in 'standby' and to coordinate among themselves using a watchdog service. This requires that they all be aware of each other and have unique configurations on each.
Since I never intend pgpool to handle the replication and failure elections of the database, do they really need to be cluster aware? Can't I just have multiple active pgpool instances in the cluster without using the watchdog service?