Gabriele Bartolini

This CNPG Recipe explores the latest enhancements to CloudNativePG’s software supply chain and image management. Learn how our new, fully controlled build process—complete with Snyk scanning, image signing, and SBOMs—delivers smaller, more secure PostgreSQL images. We also detail how to leverage the newly streamlined image catalogs for simplified, declarative cluster management and safer fleet-wide upgrades in Kubernetes.

PostgreSQL 18 is officially released, packed with improvements for performance, authentication, operations, and security. In this article, I’ll show you how to run it on Kubernetes from day one with CloudNativePG. I will summarise key new features like asynchronous I/O and OAuth 2.0, as well as the extension_control_path parameter. This is a simple but critical feature for operational control in cloud-native environments, and one our team at CloudNativePG and EDB was proud to help contribute to PostgreSQL. You’ll see how this reflects our close collaboration with the upstream community, learn about our new half-sized minimal container image, and be able to follow my guide to deploy your first cluster today.

In this article, I explore how CloudNativePG 1.27 enhances PostgreSQL liveness probes, including primary isolation checks that mitigate split-brain scenarios and integrate seamlessly with Kubernetes. We also discuss how these improvements lay the groundwork for advanced features like quorum-based failover while maintaining stability, safety, and community-driven decision-making.

Explore the new readiness probe introduced in CloudNativePG 1.26, which advances Kubernetes-native lifecycle management for PostgreSQL. Building on the improved probing infrastructure discussed in my previous article, this piece focuses on how readiness probes ensure that only fully synchronised and healthy instances—particularly replicas—are eligible to serve traffic or be promoted to primary. Special emphasis is placed on the streaming probe type and its integration with synchronous replication, giving administrators fine-grained control over failover behaviour and data consistency.

CloudNativePG 1.26 introduces enhanced support for Kubernetes startup probes, giving users finer control over how and when PostgreSQL instances are marked as “started.” This article explores the new capabilities, including both basic and advanced configuration modes, and explains the different probe strategies—such as pg_isready, SQL query, and streaming for replicas. It provides practical guidance for improving the reliability of high-availability Postgres clusters by aligning startup conditions with actual database readiness.