Floor Drees

May 4, 2025 • 2 minutes

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.

Today’s spotlight: Philippe Scorsolini, based in Italy. Philippe is a Staff Software Engineer and Tech Lead at Upbound, working on their Spaces product, and maintaining the Crossplane project.

Coming from an infrastructure background, Philippe focused on Kubernetes and knew PostgreSQL as a user, but not as an administrator. “However, I was always fascinated by PostgreSQL!” So, when the team at EDB reached out for a position working on a Kubernetes controller for it, he accepted right away. That operator of course is now known as CloudNativePG. “Once it was open-sourced, although I wasn’t working on it full-time anymore, they made me a maintainer, which I feel honored by.”

His first contribution to the project was small, just adding a name to the metrics port to allow it to be easily discovered by the Prometheus operator. The next one was more interesting: Philippe was one of the people introducing the current framework used to parse Postgres logs and output them in JSON. If he could ask for one thing to be improved in CloudNativePG, it would have to be the Pooler resource. “Through the years, as a CloudNativePG user, I’ve ended up hitting a few of its limitations. We always wanted to support more poolers, but never got around to it.” Yet.

Philippe grew up in a small city in Italy nearby the border with Slovenia, and then moved to Milan when he went to University. He was always interested in technology, not just computers, but more broadly understanding how things worked. “I enjoy experimenting and iterating fast. Technology, and open-source more specifically, was just the best playground I could find for merging the two aspects: everything is just a few clicks away, and iterating has negligible costs.” Philippe does not expect he’ll ever lose interest.

If you wanted to get in touch with Philippe, you can find him in the CloudNativePG channels on the CNCF Slack workspace, or on Twitter or Bluesky.