Data on Kubernetes

2025 marked a historic turning point for CloudNativePG, headlined by its acceptance into the CNCF sandbox and a subsequent application for incubation. Throughout the year, the project transitioned from a high-performance operator to a strategic architectural partner within the cloud-native ecosystem, collaborating with projects like Cilium and Keycloak. Key milestones included the co-development of the extension_control_path feature for PostgreSQL 18, revolutionising extension management via OCI images, and the General Availability of the Barman Cloud Plugin. With nearly 880 commits (marking five consecutive years of high-velocity development) and over 132 million downloads, CloudNativePG has solidified its position as the standard for declarative, resilient, and sovereign PostgreSQL on Kubernetes.

This blog post recaps my eventful participation in KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 in Atlanta, highlighting the key decision by maintainers to formally apply for CNCF Incubation for the CloudNativePG operator. I had the pleasure of delivering three presentations: a CNPG Lightning Talk focused on community contribution; a deep-dive with Yoshiyuki Tabata on implementing modern PostgreSQL authorisation using Keycloak and OAuth for robust database security; and a session with Jeremy Schneider introducing the new quorum-based consistency feature in CNPG 1.28 for safer cluster reconfigurations. Links to the videos of all three talks are shared within the full article.

For many Postgres DBAs, Kubernetes feels like a new, complex world. But what if your existing skills were the key to unlocking it? This article demystifies cloud-native Postgres by revealing a first handful of kubectl and kubectl cnpg commands that act as your direct translator. I’ll move past the intimidating YAML to focus on the practical, imperative commands you’ll actually use to troubleshoot, inspect, and even perform a production switchover. You’ll see how your core DBA work maps directly to this new environment, helping you build the confidence to take the next step into the cloud-native world.

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.

Learn how to set up a PostgreSQL cluster with the pgvector extension on Kubernetes using CloudNativePG—all in a fully declarative way. This article walks you through the process in just a few minutes, from cluster creation to extension installation.

CloudNativePG 1.26 introduces one of its most anticipated features: declarative in-place major upgrades for PostgreSQL using pg_upgrade. This new approach allows you to upgrade PostgreSQL clusters by simply modifying the imageName in their configuration—just like a minor version update. While it requires brief downtime, it significantly reduces operational overhead, making it ideal for managing large fleets of PostgreSQL databases in Kubernetes. In this article, I will explore how it works, its benefits and limitations, and cover an upgrade of a 2.2TB database.