Gabriele Bartolini

The Past, Present, and Future of Postgres in Kubernetes

PostgreSQL is steadily becoming the database of choice for cloud-native environments, mirroring its success on VMs and bare metal. This transformation is driven by PostgreSQL’s unmatched extensibility, which powers modern workloads like AI/ML through extensions such as pgvector. At the heart of this momentum in Kubernetes is CloudNativePG (CNPG)—a vendor-neutral, open-source PostgreSQL operator now part of the CNCF Sandbox. CNPG has matured rapidly thanks to a growing contributor community and its focus on robust Day 2 operations, making it a reliable alternative to proprietary DBaaS offerings. Running Postgres in Kubernetes is no longer an experiment—it's a production-ready path to database cloud neutrality, offering organisations greater control, cost efficiency, and data sovereignty. In this talk, I’ll share the journey of PostgreSQL in Kubernetes from its early days to where we are today, and what lies ahead. As a CNPG co-founder and PostgreSQL contributor, I’ll walk you through CNPG’s origins, reasons, architecture, key capabilities, community growth, and future roadmap—giving you practical insights into managing Postgres at scale in the cloud-native world.