Building and maintaining an 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.

Niccolò Fei (niccolofei on GitHub) is a Kubernetes Administrator and Automation Engineer at EDB. Like some of the other CloudNativePG maintainers and contributors, Niccolò was part of the team at 2ndQuadrant (acquired by EDB in 2020) when the initial project (CNP / Cloud Native PostgreSQL) started.

Niccolò made his first contribution to the CloudNativePG project in December 2020, when he developed a set of end-to-end (E2E) tests to verify core functionalities such as configuration changes, rolling updates, switchover, and synchronous replication. This initial contribution not only served as a practical introduction to the project’s E2E testing suite but also offered valuable insight into the fundamental principles behind CloudNativePG. To this day, Niccolò considers it a great starting point for anyone looking to begin contributing to the project.

If he had unlimited time and skills to dedicate, Niccolò says he would focus on improving support for dynamically loading PostgreSQL extensions in running clusters—a feature he has recently been working on. In fact, the first implementation of this capability has just been included in the 1.27.0 release candidate!

“Looking ahead, I expect to see many additional features and refinements in this area, such as support for extensions in ImageCatalogs.” PostgreSQL’s extensibility and adaptability are some of its greatest strengths, and this new approach to managing extensions introduces meaningful improvements in security, maintainability, and overall flexibility.

Active in the Postgres and Kubernetes communities, Niccolò has a strong interest in automation and DevOps tooling. His passion for technology began early: “I’ve been fascinated by computers since childhood—mostly because of video games and my love for sci-fi movies and books. Growing up, I started buying and selling hardware, building PCs for myself and friends, and experimenting with different Linux distributions. I always knew I wanted to work in this field, so when the opportunity to work with PostgreSQL and databases came along, I jumped at the chance!”

Niccolò’s future is almost certainly intertwined with OSS: “I will continue to contribute to open source—it’s a fantastic way to keep learning while building things that can help others.”

If you wanted to get in touch with Niccolò, you can find him in the CloudNativePG channels on the CNCF Slack workspace, or on Bluesky, or LinkedIn. You can follow the CloudNativePG project on Bluesky and Mastodon too!