Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes 5.2 Launch

We are excited to announce the release of Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes version 5.2. We have been hard at work on a lot of new features we cannot wait to get into your hands. You can get started on version 5.2 from our container portal or the get started tutorial. We have decided to highlight a few of our favorite features today.

Command Lines for Everyone

First, we are very excited to release the first iteration of our CLI for PGO v5, pgo. Our CLI is designed as a kubectl plugin. You can get it here and you can use it today with PGO 5.2. We have taken steps to align our CLI very closely to kubectl for ease of use. pgo also works as a plugin with the OpenShift oc CLI. This ensures that developer experience matches the rest of Kubernetes.

For example, you can now use the following command to create a cluster:

pgo create postgrescluster hippo

Or this command to backup a cluster:

pgo backup hippo --repoName="repo1”

This is a preview release of the CLI, and we will be working hard on adding more commands and workflows. We welcome feedback on what you would like to see included.

Streaming Replication

Enabling opinionated and safe streaming replication for Kubernetes workloads was one of our goals in 5.2 to increase the choices for achieving disaster recovery. Streaming replication can be faster than log shipping and does not rely on a single s3 storage area. You can read more about how to turn this feature on in the documentation.

This feature allows new architecture choices for replicas and standbys, with low latency direct interconnectivity. Now we support streaming replication as well as the use of both streaming and a cloud-based WAL archive in conjunction.

Feature Gates and Sidecars

We have added two feature gates related to sidecars. You can now add any container you want to Postgres or PgBouncer pods through the PostgresCluster spec. It can be an observability agent like DataDog or New Relic, a network proxy like poolers or service meshes, or an API endpoint like Hasura. The possibilities are endless and we’re excited to see what our users build. We relaxed the runAsNonRoot security setting so you can run more images from your favorite registries. This opens up more custom use cases in a safe and opinionated fashion. This will allow folks on 5.2 additional flexibly to design a system that works well for their needs. You can read more in the documentation.

We will be working with customers and partners to release documented sidecar patterns in the coming months, and we welcome your pull requests if you want to share.

Easy Upgrades

With the 5.x version of PGO, we have focused on making the upgrade process easier. One improvement that we have delivered with 5.2 is the new Pause Reconcile feature. This enables customers to pause execution of a reconcile until such a time as it is convenient. This will allow users to stage changes, and execute them when it is convenient.

Upgrading your PGO version requires just a few simple non-destructive steps to. For example, if you are on 5.1 series, updating to 5.2 can be as easy as:

kubectl apply --server-side -k kustomize/install/default

And More…

We are very excited to bring you this next version of Postgres for Kubernetes. This is just a sampling of the new features and fixes that we have shipped with this version. We hope that you enjoy using it, and as always we value our community's feedback. The full feature notes are available in our documentation.



co-authored with Andrew L'Ecuyer and Chris Bandy