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CloudNativePG in 2024: Milestones, Innovations, and Reflections

·11 mins
postgresql postgres kubernetes k8s cloudnativepg cnpg dok data on kubernetes CNCF Sandbox incubation databases VolumeGroupSnapshot extensions storage ecosystem edb
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2024 was a transformative year for CloudNativePG, marked by significant contributions to the Kubernetes ecosystem, increased adoption, and a growing community. This article reflects on key milestones, including the integration of advanced Kubernetes features, conference highlights, and personal insights, while looking ahead to the opportunities awaiting PostgreSQL in the cloud-native era.

When Kubernetes debuted a decade ago, I could never have predicted that it would become such an integral part of my professional journey. While I only began working with Kubernetes in August 2019, it quickly became clear to me that it was the future of running PostgreSQL. By the end of that year, we had our prototype operator, and, together with my fantastic team, we made a pivotal decision: I would never go back to using virtual machines to run PostgreSQL. That decision has shaped my work ever since.

Fast-forward to 2024, which marked my fifth year of running PostgreSQL on Kubernetes and a transformative period for CloudNativePG. Open-sourced in May 2022, CloudNativePG has grown into one of the leading solutions for running PostgreSQL in Kubernetes. It stands out as the only operator governed by a vendor-neutral, openly governed community designed to be truly Kubernetes-native.

Let’s take a closer look at the milestones we achieved this year.

Popularity #

The rising popularity of CloudNativePG is best exemplified by the growing number of stars on its GitHub repository —a clear and transparent measure of community support.

This organic growth highlights the trust and enthusiasm of its users, achieved without reliance on artificial marketing boosts from either the CloudNativePG Community or EDB. As the primary creator and supporting organisation of CloudNativePG, EDB has played a pivotal role in its success. With a long-standing reputation as a leader in PostgreSQL development, EDB continues to drive innovation and collaboration within the broader open-source ecosystem, bridging the gap between Postgres and Kubernetes and ensuring the project’s sustained growth and relevance.

A snapshot taken on January 10, 2024, shows that CloudNativePG was the third most popular PostgreSQL operator, with roughly 2.7k stars. At the time, Crunchy’s PGO had around 3.6k stars (900 more), and the Zalando operator led with nearly 3.8k stars (1.1k ahead).

Star History of the major operators on Jan 2024

However, significant milestones were reached later in the year. In July, CloudNativePG surpassed Crunchy’s PGO to claim the second spot, and by September, it overtook Zalando to become the most popular operator. Today, CloudNativePG has nearly 5k stars, outpacing Zalando with 4.4k and Crunchy’s PGO with 4k.

Star History of the major operators on Dec 2024

In 2024 alone, CloudNativePG achieved an impressive milestone, gaining 2.3k stars on GitHub—an average of over six stars per day. This far outpaced its peers, with Zalando adding 700 stars (+1.6k total) and Crunchy gaining 400 (+1.9k total). The remarkable momentum has captured widespread attention, including a colourful endorsement from Percona’s founder, Peter Zaitsev. Speaking at Data on Kubernetes Day during KubeCon North America in Salt Lake City last November, Zaitsev remarked:

CloudNativePG is kicking everybody’s a**e!

Releases #

In 2024, we followed a robust release cadence, delivering updates across nine release windows:

With the release of version 1.23, we made a significant strategic decision to streamline our support policy.

As a community, we now only support the latest minor version of CloudNativePG and extend support for the second-last minor version for an additional three months. This change has dramatically simplified our codebase management, reducing the need for extensive backports and the complexity of automated test combinations in our continuous delivery pipelines.

Another pivotal improvement was the introduction of release candidates, prompted by a retrospective analysis of the misstep in version 1.23.0 — which required a swift 1.23.1 patch just five days later. The new release candidate process has allowed us to provide our user base with preview versions of upcoming releases, such as 1.24 and 1.25, fostering better feedback and stability.

In 2023, CloudNativePG followed a similar pattern, delivering four minor releases (1.22, 1.21, 1.20, and 1.19) across eight release windows. Looking ahead to 2025, we aim to streamline this cadence further by targeting one minor release per quarter, ensuring a more predictable and consistent release schedule.

Features #

The three minor releases in 2024 brought several exciting new features and enhancements to CloudNativePG.

My favourite is the declarative support for distributed topologies of PostgreSQL databases across multiple Kubernetes clusters. This feature enables hybrid and multi-cloud deployments through native physical replication using Infrastructure as Code (IaC). I detail this in my blog article, “Making the World My Single Point of Failure with PostgreSQL,” and it can be easily explored using the CNPG Playground.

The second is the new API for synchronous replication control, which provides unprecedented opportunities to balance data durability and self-healing. It also enables complete configuration of PostgreSQL’s synchronous_standby_names option. For more details, check out “CNPG Recipe 16 - Balancing Data Durability and Self-Healing with Synchronous Replication”syncrep and “CNPG Recipe 13 - Configuring PostgreSQL Synchronous Replication.”.

The third is the first hooks implementation for CNPG-I, the CloudNativePG Interface. This framework enables third parties to extend the CloudNativePG operator through plugins, eliminating the need to modify the core codebase—similar to how Kubernetes and PostgreSQL operate.

Finally, we significantly enhanced support for native logical replication, making it easier than ever to migrate to CloudNativePG from any PostgreSQL 10+ instance, including DBaaS solutions like RDS. CloudNativePG 1.25 introduces support for declarative logical replication subscriptions and publications. This technology also facilitates online major upgrades of PostgreSQL with near-zero cutover time. Read “CNPG Recipe 15 - PostgreSQL Major Online Upgrades with Logical Replication” and “CNPG Recipe 5 - How to Migrate Your PostgreSQL Database in Kubernetes with Near-Zero Downtime from Anywhere” for more information.

Ecosystem Evolution #

CloudNativePG is evolving around its main project, the CloudNativePG operator, into a comprehensive ecosystem for running PostgreSQL in Kubernetes. The recently introduced CNPG-I framework will amplify this transformation in the future.

In 2024, we made an important change to the project’s governance by introducing the concept of components and, most notably, component owners. While maintainers oversee the entire project, component owners are maintainers of specific sub-projects. Key components include container images, Helm charts, Grafana dashboards, OLM, and the website.

Two standout components introduced this year are:

  • CNPG Playground: A local learning environment designed to experiment with CloudNativePG, leveraging Docker and Kind to simplify onboarding and exploration.
  • Barman Cloud Plugin for Backup and Recovery on Object Stores: This marks our first plugin for the CNPG-I framework and is poised to eventually replace the in-core support for Barman Cloud, aligning with our modular vision.

Kubernetes development #

2024 marked a milestone year for our project as one of our developers made a significant contribution to Kubernetes: Leonardo Cecchi, co-founder and maintainer of CloudNativePG, played a pivotal role as a key contributor to the development of VolumeGroupSnapshot support in Kubernetes 1.32. This feature lays a critical foundation for future backup and recovery operations for PostgreSQL databases using volume snapshotting within Kubernetes environments.

This achievement highlights the holistic approach our team at EDB takes in integrating Postgres and Kubernetes, combining technical innovation with community-driven collaboration.

Conference Talks #

This year, I was privileged to present at several significant events in the cloud-native and PostgreSQL communities.

KubeCon & CloudNative Highlights #

At KubeCon Europe in Paris (March), I delivered two sessions:

In November, I travelled to Salt Lake City for KubeCon North America, participating in a panel discussion on the future of DBaaS on Kubernetes alongside industry experts Melissa Logan (Constantia and Data on Kubernetes Community - DoK), Sergey Pronin (Percona), and Deepthi Sigireddi (PlanetScale).

Earlier that week, at Cloud Native Rejekts, Leonardo Cecchi and I co-presented “Maximising Microservice Databases with Kubernetes, Postgres, and CloudNativePG”, which you can watch here.

Capping off a busy November, I was honoured to speak at the Kubernetes Community Days Denmark in Copenhagen. My talk, “CloudNativePG: The Past, The Present, The Future”, provided a comprehensive overview of the project’s evolution and vision. You can watch the recording here.

PostgreSQL Conferences #

In addition to cloud-native events, I spoke at two PostgreSQL conferences:

Athens provided a particularly inspiring glimpse into the evolving perception of Kubernetes within the PostgreSQL community. Adam Wright’s session, “Demystifying Kubernetes for Postgres DBAs: A Guide to Operators”, drew a packed audience, demonstrating growing interest among Postgres professionals.

Another standout talk was David Pech’s “From VMs to Cloud-Native PostgreSQL in Kubernetes: A Case Study of Migrating a Medium-Sized Application”. Despite being scheduled concurrently with Robert Haas’ session on incremental backups in PostgreSQL 17, Pech’s talk highlighted practical insights into cloud-native adoption—a key theme resonating throughout the conference.

Articles #

On February 28, 2024, I launched my blog at gabrielebartolini.it, dedicated to running PostgreSQL on Kubernetes with CloudNativePG. The response surpassed my most optimistic expectations: in just 10 months, I published 25 articles, attracting tens of thousands of visits, according to Google Analytics.

Here are some of the most popular posts:

  1. CNPG Recipe 5 - How to migrate your PostgreSQL database in Kubernetes with ~0 downtime from anywhere
  2. CNPG Recipe 1 - Setting up your local playground in minutes
  3. Maximizing Microservice Databases with Kubernetes, Postgres, and CloudNativePG
  4. CNPG Recipe 4 - Connecting to Your PostgreSQL Cluster with pgAdmin4
  5. Kubernetes Just Turned Ten: Where Does PostgreSQL Stand?

I also want to spotlight an insightful article by Shaun Thomas, a former colleague at 2ndQuadrant and EDB, a friend and one of the foremost experts in PostgreSQL High Availability. In his piece, “Kubernetes Killed the High Availability Star”, Shaun draws on years of experience deploying enterprise-level PostgreSQL in bare metal and VM environments. He makes a compelling case for why Kubernetes is now the go-to platform for high-availability PostgreSQL deployments.

Shaun’s article perfectly aligns with my ideas in “The Urge for ‘T-Shaped’ Profiles to Smooth the Challenges of Running Postgres in Kubernetes”. In this post, I discuss the vast opportunities for PostgreSQL DBAs to adapt and thrive in the Kubernetes era. Thank you, Shaun, for reinforcing this message!

Application to the CNCF Sandbox #

In September, CloudNativePG submitted its second application to the CNCF Sandbox, marking an exciting step forward for the project. We are optimistic that it will be accepted this time, setting the stage for CloudNativePG to become the first PostgreSQL database project to embark on the CNCF graduation process. If the Sandbox application is approved in January, our next milestone will be achieving incubation status, further cementing CloudNativePG’s role as a foundational solution in the cloud-native database ecosystem and advancing the democratisation of PostgreSQL access.

Reflections on 2024 #

On a personal note, 2024 has been a challenging year. In March, I faced the heartbreaking loss of my friend, mentor, and leader Simon Riggs. Simon’s untimely passing left an unfillable void but also a lasting legacy for those of us who had the privilege of growing as PostgreSQL professionals and human beings under his guidance and example. His unwavering dedication to making PostgreSQL the best database in the world inspires me every day.

Simon was a staunch advocate for PostgreSQL extensions, and it feels fitting to mention ongoing efforts in this area. One such initiative is the extension_control_path patch, being developed for PostgreSQL 18 by Peter Eisentraut. This improvement will provide a foundation for running immutable, self-contained container images of PostgreSQL extensions, enabling them to be loaded at runtime in CloudNativePG. While this effort will hopefully come to fruition in 2025, it represents an exciting step forward for extension management and flexibility. David Wheeler from Tembo recapped the status of this work in his blog post “RFC: Extension Packaging & Lookup”.

Looking Ahead #

After reflecting on the measurable achievements of the past year, I want to conclude with a more personal perspective. Having been part of the PostgreSQL and Kubernetes ecosystem for quite some time, it’s clear to me that something extraordinary is happening around CloudNativePG. A vibrant, dynamic community is emerging, and the convergence of PostgreSQL and Kubernetes is opening unprecedented opportunities for both new and seasoned PostgreSQL users.

As we enter 2025, I’m optimistic about the future. CloudNativePG and the broader PostgreSQL-on-Kubernetes movement are poised for remarkable growth. Let’s keep building, innovating, and growing together. Happy New Year!

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Cover Picture: “Herd Of Elephants in African Bush“.

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