Floor Drees

April 14, 2025 • 2 minutes

Building and maintaining and open source project takes a village. In a mini-series on this blog we would like to highlight the work of our maintainers, component owners, and members of the larger community.

We start with Itay Grudev. Why? Because he was the first to reply: “You caught me at the perfect time, I was just drinking my morning coffee with not much else going on.”

Itay loves computers and has been fascinated with them since he was just a kid. It’s no surprise then that he ended up working in Tech (and Kubernetes and DevOps in specific). He suspects that “some degree of autism helps getting along with computers too”.

Why CloudNativePG

Itay works as a Software Engineering Consultant at Verito Digital, a web agency. He first heard about CloudNativePG when he was looking for a well-designed PostgreSQL operator. “The company I worked for at the time became the second CloudNativePG adopter, after EDB.”

Known for…

Itay then got involved as a contributor developing a Cluster Helm chart to complement the Operator Helm chart. Yep, he’s the one to thank for that!

If there’s anything he could change, it would be to speed up Barman, and he also believes it should not be implemented in Python. “Kudos to Gabriele Bartolini and Marco Nenciarini for building it and getting us to the point where we can complain about it, but it’s time we replace it!” Message received, Itay!

Today Itay is a component owner for the Operator chart and PostgreSQL Cluster Chart, and for the Grafana Dashboard for CloudNativePG

He tries to avoid social media - it’s too addictive - but you can find Itay in the CloudNativePG channels on the CNCF Slack workspace, or on GitHub.