Gabriele Bartolini

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.

Say goodbye to the old way of distributing Postgres extensions as part of the main pre-built operand image. Leveraging the Kubernetes ImageVolume feature, CloudNativePG now allows you to mount extensions like pgvector and PostGIS from separate, dedicated images. This new declarative method completely decouples the PostgreSQL core from the extension binaries, enabling dynamic addition, easier evaluation, and simplified updates without ever having to build or manage monolithic custom container images.

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.