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.
- 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
- 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.
| Release | Postgres versions | K8s versions | Golang |
|---|---|---|---|
| v2.0.0 | 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 |
For a quick first impression follow the instructions of this tutorial.
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.
There is a browser-friendly version of this documentation at postgres-operator.readthedocs.io