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
• 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

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
next	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
v1.10.1	10 → 15	1.21+	1.19.8

Getting started

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

Supported setups of Postgres and Applications

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