CloudNativePG becomes a CNCF Incubating Project

The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted to accept CloudNativePG as a CNCF incubating project.

CloudNativePG is an open source Kubernetes operator that manages the full lifecycle of highly available PostgreSQL clusters. Organizations across financial services, insurance, telecommunications, automotive, retail, and the public sector use it to run production PostgreSQL in Kubernetes without bolting on separate failover tooling.

“What started as a crazy idea of our small team in Prato, Italy, in 2019 is becoming a standard way of running PostgreSQL in production, with the declarative configuration, standardisation, immutability, and security that Kubernetes brings,” said Gabriele Bartolini, VP and Distinguished Engineer at EDB, co-founder and maintainer of CloudNativePG. “We did not accept the status quo: we decided to push both PostgreSQL and Kubernetes into new territory. It is challenging, and there have been tough moments, but today we have one of the best ways to run PostgreSQL at large scale. Incubation is another rung on the ladder, and the journey continues.”

CloudNativePG’s Milestones and Ecosystem Development

CloudNativePG uses a primary/standby architecture with native streaming replication. Instead of relying on external tools, it integrates directly with the Kubernetes API, so the cluster’s state is declared, reconciled, and observed the same way as any other Kubernetes resource. The operator handles automated failover, rolling updates, self-healing, connection pooling, continuous backup, and point-in-time recovery. It runs the PostgreSQL instances as pods it manages directly, without StatefulSets.

EDB, a leading contributor to PostgreSQL for over two decades, created CloudNativePG and submitted it to the CNCF in 2024, before it was officially accepted as a sandbox project on January 21, 2025. Since then, the community has shipped five releases (1.26 through 1.30), plus ongoing patch releases. The latest, v1.30.1, was published on September 23, 2026. Highlights include:

• Declarative, offline in-place major version upgrades (1.26)
• Dynamic loading of PostgreSQL extensions (1.27)
• Quorum-based failover promoted to stable (1.28)
• Dynamic network access control (1.29)
• A Lease-based mechanism for safe primary election and a new DatabaseRole resource with automatically issued and renewed TLS client certificates for password-free authentication (1.30)

The project also participates in the CNCF LFX Mentorship program and formalized its governance in a dedicated governance repository, with public, transparent votes recorded as GitHub issues.

CloudNativePG connects to the broader cloud native ecosystem with documented integrations including External Secrets and Cilium. It also works with cert-manager for TLS certificates, exposes metrics through a built-in Prometheus exporter, and offers a Keycloak OAuth validator. A September 2026 CNCF blog shows this in practice with OpenBao running on Kubernetes with CloudNativePG as its storage backend. The setup uses a three-instance cluster with quorum-based synchronous replication to protect data during failover. DatabaseRole resources issue and renew TLS client certificates, so no database role needs a password. Explicit pg_hba rules require certificate authentication, and scheduling rules keep PostgreSQL on dedicated nodes in separate zones.

More than 50 organizations are listed as production adopters, including IBM, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, GEICO Tech, Akamai, Novo Nordisk, REWE International, PZU Group, Tesla, Ericsson, and the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (Belastingdienst). Ten of those were added in 2026 alone. 

CloudNativePG’s Roadmap

The CloudNativePG roadmap includes release v1.31, planned for around December 2026, and v1.32 for around March 2027. Version 1.31 ships with native Barman Cloud support, which moves fully to the CNPG-I plugin architecture starting with v1.32. Klio, a multi-tiered cloud native backup and recovery solution built on CNPG-I, launches before the end of 2026.

Beyond releases, the project plans to:

• Raise its compliance with the Open Source Project Security Baseline (OSPS Baseline) to level 3
• Apply for CNCF Graduation in 2027
• Publish blueprints that integrate PostgreSQL with other CNCF projects through CloudNativePG, such as OpenTelemetry, Keycloak and SPIFFE/SPIRE
• Publish a set of distributable tests that anyone can run to validate an environment, followed by an official CloudNativePG conformance program, to enable more supported distributions and third-party plugins built on CNPG-I
• Resume participation in the CNCF LFX Mentorship program

Main Components

CloudNativePG’s main components consist of the following:

• Operator and Cluster resource: the controller and central custom resource that declare and reconcile an entire PostgreSQL cluster. It manages Pods, volumes, Services, and Secrets directly, without StatefulSets, orchestrating failover and rolling updates instance by instance.
• Instance Manager: runs as PID 1 in the PostgreSQL container, with no sidecars. It manages the PostgreSQL lifecycle and promotion, reports health and replication lag, serves database-aware probes, and reconciles Database, Publication, Subscription, and DatabaseRole resources inside PostgreSQL.
• Operand images and image catalogs: maintained PostgreSQL container images, with declarative catalogs for managing versions across clusters.
• CNPG-I: the plugin interface that lets the community extend CloudNativePG without forking it, which is where backup and recovery solutions plug in.
• Backup and recovery: the Barman Cloud plugin today, and Klio, a multi-tiered cloud native backup and recovery solution built on CNPG-I and launching soon.
• Tooling: the kubectl cnpg plugin, Helm charts, dashboards, and PgBouncer-based connection pooling.

Notable Milestones

• 9,500 GitHub Stars
• 7,301 pull requests 
• 3,905 issues
• 4,403 Contributors from 1487 organizations and 49 countries
• 274M Operator downloads
• 192M Postgres operand downloads

CNCF-Hosted Projects

The CNCF TOC provides technical leadership to the cloud native projects and community. It defines and maintains the foundation’s technical vision, approves new projects, and stewards them across maturity levels. The TOC also aligns projects within the overall ecosystem, sets cross-cutting standards and best practices, and works with end users to ensure long-term sustainability. As part of its principles, the TOC evaluates and supports projects as they meet requirements for incubation and continue progressing toward graduation.

As a CNCF-hosted project, CloudNativePG is part of a neutral foundation aligned with its technical interests, as well as the larger Linux Foundation, which provides governance, marketing support, and community outreach. CloudNativePG joins incubating technologies Artifact Hub, Backstage, Chaos Mesh, Cloud Custodian, Confidential Containers, Container Network Interface (CNI), Contour, Cortex, Emissary-ingress, Fluid, gRPC, HAMi, k8gb, Keycloak, KServe, Kubescape, KubeVela, KubeVirt, Lima, Litmus, Longhorn, Meshery, metal3-io, Microcks, NATS, Notary Project, OpenCost, OpenFeature, OpenFGA, OpenKruise, OpenYurt, Operator Framework, Strimzi, Tekton, Thanos, Volcano, and wasmCloud. 

For detailed maturity requirements at each level, please visit the CNCF Graduation Criteria.