I googled 1 hour approximately, but have not found a ready solution for this. So maybe this feature is in PostgreSQL todo-list, or something similar exists somewhere...
Before the actual question, I'd like to give a small analogy. What I mostly love in MongoDB is that it supports a fully transparent scheme of replication failover. If you have >= 3 MongoDB notes (e.g. 1 master and 2 replicas), and the master dies, in a couple of seconds a replica is AUTOMATICALLY elected as a new master, and all other replicas are AUTOMATICALLY begin to follow it. If the dead master is back again suddenly, it first appears as a replica, but in a couple of seconds it becomes a new master back (because it initially had a highest weight assigned), and all replicas become to follow it. All these steps are done automatically and transparently. It just works.
So does something similar and more-or-less stable exist for PostgrSQL too?
- repmgr: always referred at StackOverflow (thousands of times), but it does not provide an automatic failover :-)
- pgpool-2: it contains a couple of config options for "failover", but in practice they are too poor to be used in production and with large databases, I believe after reading the docs
- pacemaker's plugin: extremely complex (IMHO) overweighted for this purpose