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Version: 1.30

Release notes for CloudNativePG 1.30

History of user-visible changes in the 1.30 minor release of CloudNativePG.

For a complete list of changes, please refer to the commits on the release branch in GitHub.

Version 1.30.0-rc1​

Release date: Jun 19, 2026

Important changes​

  • The cluster reference is now immutable on the Database, Pooler, Publication, Subscription, and ScheduledBackup resources. Pointing one of these objects at a different cluster has no well-defined semantics and previously left the controllers in an inconsistent state; the update is now rejected at the API server via a CEL validation rule. (#10743)

Features​

  • Primary Lease for safe primary election: introduced a Kubernetes Lease object (named after the cluster) that acts as a mutex serializing primary promotion: the instance manager must hold the lease before acting as primary and releases it on clean shutdown so replicas can promote without waiting for the full TTL. Timings are configurable via the new .spec.primaryLease stanza. The lease is a promotion gate, not a fence — primary isolation remains responsible for fencing. (#10627)

  • DatabaseRole CRD for declarative role management: introduced a DatabaseRole custom resource that manages a PostgreSQL role as a standalone Kubernetes object, instead of declaring it inline in the Cluster's .spec.managed.roles stanza. Each role gets its own lifecycle, status, and RBAC, which suits GitOps workflows and lets role definitions live next to the applications that own them. The spec reuses the same RoleConfiguration structure as the inline method, so migrating a role is a matter of moving the stanza into its own manifest. A databaseRoleReclaimPolicy field (retain, the default, or delete) controls what happens to the role when the resource is deleted, mirroring persistent volumes. (#6155)

  • TLS client certificates for declarative roles: a DatabaseRole can now include a clientCertificate block to have the operator automatically generate and renew a TLS client certificate, signed by the cluster's client CA and stored in a <databaserole-name>-client-cert Secret. This enables password-free PostgreSQL cert authentication; the Secret is cleaned up when the feature is disabled or the DatabaseRole is deleted. (#10896)

  • PgBouncer image management via image catalogs: the Pooler resource can now reference an entry in an ImageCatalog or ClusterImageCatalog through the new spec.pgbouncer.imageCatalogRef field, centralizing PgBouncer image management. When a catalog entry is updated, all referencing Poolers are automatically reconciled and roll out the new image without any change to their spec. The resolved image is reported in status.image, and a new status.phase (active, paused, inactive, or failed) — also surfaced as a Phase column in kubectl get pooler — summarizes the lifecycle. (#10568)

Enhancements​

  • Enabled pg_upgrade in-place major upgrades to PostgreSQL 19 or later for clusters that use Image Volume extensions, building on the extension-path support added to pg_upgrade in PostgreSQL 19. During the upgrade Job, the source- and target-version extension images are mounted side by side, so the old server keeps its libraries and a failed upgrade reverts cleanly. (#10366)

  • Added TLS support for the Pooler metrics endpoint via .spec.monitoring.tls.enabled. When enabled, the metrics server is served over HTTPS, reusing the certificate and key from .spec.pgbouncer.clientTLSSecret and reloading it on every handshake to support rotation without a restart; the generated PodMonitor scrapes over https accordingly. (#10466)

  • Added a label selector to the Cluster scale subresource (status.selector), making a Cluster a valid targetRef for the Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) and Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA), which can now map a Cluster to its instance pods. Contributed by @sebv004. (#8996)

  • The operator now emits a Warning PrimaryStatusCheckFailed event on the Cluster when the primary pod is Ready from the kubelet perspective but the operator's /pg/status check fails and failover is deferred, giving users visibility into the deferral via kubectl describe cluster. (#10509)

  • Added the ENABLE_WEBHOOK_NAMESPACE_SUFFIX flag, which suffixes the operator's webhook configuration names with -<OPERATOR_NAMESPACE> so that multiple operator instances can coexist on the same cluster. The operator only looks up these configurations; users must create and maintain them. Contributed by @maxlengdell. (#10420)

  • The operator now reloads a CNPG-i plugin automatically when its pods are rolled: it watches the EndpointSlices backing plugin Services and re-enqueues every cluster using the plugin once the new pods become Ready, so an upgraded plugin is picked up without waiting for the next resync. (#10836)

  • Instance serial numbers are now assigned by reusing the lowest free slot among existing instance names, instead of always incrementing a global counter. Pod and PVC names stay stable across instance recreation (for example, an instance recreated after a node drain comes back with the same name), and serials freed by deleted instances are reclaimed. A new Initialized cluster condition reports whether the cluster has completed its first bootstrap, and status.latestGeneratedNode is deprecated: it is no longer written, but is preserved on the CRD for backward compatibility. (#10548)

  • Defaulting and validation now run during reconciliation as a fallback when admission webhooks are unavailable, or configured to ignore failures, so the operator no longer reconciles invalid or incomplete specs. Missing defaults are applied directly, and validation failures are surfaced in the resource status instead of failing silently later. (#10874)

Security​

  • search_path pinning on operator-issued connections: a database owner could plant overloaded built-in operators in the public schema and alter the search_path so that operator introspection probes, running as the cluster superuser, resolved those overloads before pg_catalog — a CWE-426 privilege-escalation chain (same class as CVE-2018-1058) that could lead to in-pod RCE via COPY ... FROM PROGRAM. The operator now pins search_path = pg_catalog, public, pg_temp on every pooled connection so it ships in the startup message and takes precedence over tenant-controlled defaults. (#10774)

  • Authenticated operator-to-instance-manager calls: the instance manager's remote webserver previously accepted unauthenticated requests, so any process on the pod network could trigger backups, instance manager upgrades, or WAL archival. The operator now generates an in-memory ECDSA P-256 client certificate at startup and reconciles its SHA-256 fingerprint into the cluster status; the instance manager rejects requests to sensitive endpoints that do not present a matching certificate. (#10579)

  • Operator-side SCRAM-SHA-256 password encoding: the operator now SCRAM-SHA-256 encodes cleartext role passwords before issuing CREATE/ALTER ROLE ... PASSWORD, so the literal PostgreSQL parses (and that extensions such as pg_stat_statements or pgaudit may capture) is the SCRAM verifier rather than the cleartext secret. Pre-hashed (MD5 or SCRAM) values are forwarded unchanged, and the per-Secret annotation cnpg.io/passwordPassthrough: "enabled" opts out. (#10724)

Changes​

  • Added support for Kubernetes 1.36. (#10900)

  • Updated the default PostgreSQL version to 18.4. (#10719)

  • Updated the Kubernetes versions used to test the operator on public cloud providers. (#10720, #10563)

Fixes​

  • Fixed declarative Database, Publication, and Subscription objects reporting a stale primary-side status forever after their cluster was demoted to a replica; the controller now re-checks the replica condition and watches the Cluster so a demotion is detected promptly. (#10871)

  • Fixed non-sequential pod names (for example -1, -3) caused by the instance serial counter being advanced before the corresponding Job and PVCs were created; the bump is now persisted only after those resources exist. (#10491)

  • Fixed deletion of a Database, Publication, or Subscription getting stuck in Terminating on a replica cluster, where the replica gate ran before the finalizer reconciler and the finalizer was never released. On a replica the PostgreSQL object is left to the primary cluster. (#10853)

  • Fixed a conflicting duplicate Database or Subscription with a delete reclaim policy dropping the PostgreSQL object owned by the surviving CR; the drop is now gated on a recorded reconciliation. (#10870)

  • Fixed the postgres superuser being left locked out after superuser access was disabled and then re-enabled, because the cached secret version was not invalidated and the password was never re-applied. Diagnosed by @mhartmann-jaconi. (#10834)

  • Fixed backups getting stuck in the started phase when the instance manager running them was restarted (for example by the in-place upgrade following an operator upgrade) before the backup reached running; the reconciliation is now rescheduled so the lost session is detected. (#10859)

  • Fixed exec/attach streaming to negotiate WebSocket with a SPDY fallback, restoring compatibility both with Kubernetes versions that have removed SPDY and with platforms such as OpenShift that reject WebSocket exec upgrades. Contributed by @bartscheers. (#10876, #10933)

  • Fixed resource leaks when concurrent Backup objects raced: backups now run in strict creation-time order, so an already-executing backup is never preempted by a newer one and its replication slot and PostgreSQL session are no longer orphaned on the primary. Contributed by @GabriFedi97. (#10747)

  • Fixed role reconciliation clearing the password on a PostgreSQL role when the referenced Secret could not be fetched; the role is now left untouched until the Secret becomes available, and per-action errors are aggregated for better visibility. (#10053)

  • Fixed a bootstrap failure where a metrics-exporter setup error (commonly a duplicate-key race with the controller) rolled back streaming_replica creation and wedged replica joins. The metrics-exporter step now runs in a separate transaction. Contributed by @BlaiseAntony. (#10749)

  • Fixed a ScheduledBackup controller loop that occurred when a Backup was created but its status patch never landed; the controller now adopts an existing Backup for the next iteration instead of looping on AlreadyExists. (#10612)

  • Fixed a nil-pointer panic when reconciling a Pooler whose Cluster has been deleted. (#10667)

  • Fixed bootstrap log handling so that all named log pipes (postgres, postgres.csv, and postgres.json) get consumers during WithActiveInstance, preventing regular files from being created in place of the named pipes. (#10043)

  • Fixed generation of invalid IPv6 URLs by wrapping the address in square brackets. Contributed by @Infinoid. (#10682)

  • Fixed an external cluster plugin still being treated as active when its configuration set enabled: false. (#10932)

  • Fixed a race during bootstrap recovery from an object store where the restore job could read a stale Cluster (primary not yet recorded and timeline still unset) and have its .history files rejected by the split-brain guard. When this happened, recovery stopped at the base backup's timeline and silently dropped transactions committed on later timelines. History files are now allowed while the cluster timeline is unset. Contributed by @dennispidun. (#10818)

Supported versions​

  • Kubernetes 1.36, 1.35, and 1.34
  • PostgreSQL 18, 17, 16, 15, and 14
    • PostgreSQL 18.4 is the default image
    • PostgreSQL 14 support ends on November 12, 2026