Postgres Operator

The Postgres Operator delivers an easy to run highly-available PostgreSQL clusters on Kubernetes (K8s) powered by Patroni. It is configured only through Postgres manifests (CRDs) to ease integration into automated CI/CD pipelines with no access to Kubernetes API directly, promoting infrastructure as code vs manual operations.

Operator features

• Rolling updates on Postgres cluster changes, incl. quick minor version updates
• Live volume resize without pod restarts (AWS EBS, PVC)
• Database connection pooling with PGBouncer
• Support fast in place major version upgrade. Supports global upgrade of all clusters.
• Pod protection during bootstrap phase and configurable maintenance windows
• Restore and cloning Postgres clusters on AWS, GCS and Azure
• Additionally logical backups to S3 or GCS bucket can be configured
• Standby cluster from S3 or GCS WAL archive or remote host
• Configurable for non-cloud environments
• Basic credential and user management on K8s, eases application deployments
• Support for custom TLS certificates
• UI to create and edit Postgres cluster manifests
• Compatible with OpenShift
• Multi-arch support

PostgreSQL features

• Supports PostgreSQL 18, starting from 14+
• Streaming replication cluster via Patroni
• Point-In-Time-Recovery with pg_basebackup / WAL-G or WAL-E via Spilo
• Preload libraries: bg_mon, pg_stat_statements, pgextwlist, pg_auth_mon
• Incl. popular Postgres extensions such as decoderbufs, hypopg, pg_cron, pg_repack, pg_partman, pg_stat_kcache, pg_audit, pgfaceting, pgq, pgvector, plpgsql_check, plproxy, postgis, roaringbitmap, set_user and timescaledb

The Postgres Operator has been developed at Zalando and is being used in production for over five years.

Supported Postgres & K8s versions

Release	Postgres versions	K8s versions	Golang
v2.0.3	14 → 18	1.27+	1.26.4
v1.15.1	13 → 17	1.27+	1.25.3
v1.14.0	13 → 17	1.27+	1.23.4
v1.13.0	12 → 16	1.27+	1.22.5
v1.12.0	11 → 16	1.27+	1.22.3
v1.11.0	11 → 16	1.27+	1.21.7

Getting started

For a quick first impression follow the instructions of this tutorial.

Migrating from v1 to v2 operator

If you have been using Postgres Operator since v1.x (thank you), make sure you have read the migration docs before deploying a v2 operator.

Documentation

There is a browser-friendly version of this documentation at postgres-operator.readthedocs.io

• How it works
• Installation
• The Postgres experience on K8s
• The Postgres Operator UI
• DBA options - from RBAC to backup
• Build, debug and extend the operator
• Configuration options
• Postgres manifest reference
• Command-line options and environment variables