Release notes for CloudNativePG 1.16

History of user-visible changes in the 1.16 minor release of CloudNativePG.

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

Version 1.16.5

Release date: Dec 21, 2022

Important announcements:

• Recognizing Armando Ruocco (@armru) as a new CloudNativePG maintainer for his consistent and impactful contributions (#1167)
• Remove ARMv7 support (#1092)
• FINAL patch release for 1.16: 1.16.5. Release 1.16 reaches end of life.

Enhancements:

• Add rpm/deb package for kubectl-cnpg plugin (#1008)
• Update default PostgreSQL version for new cluster definitions to 15.1 (#908)
• Documentation
• Remove references to CNPG sandbox (#1120) - the CNPG sandbox has been deprecated, in favor of instructions on monitoring in the Quickstart documentation
• Link to the "Release updates" discussion (#1148) - the release updates discussion will become the default channel for release announcements and discussions
• Document emeritus status for maintainers in GOVERNANCE.md (#1033) - explains how maintainers should proceed if they are not ready to continue contributing
• Improve instructions on creating pull requests (#1132)
• Troubleshooting emergency backup instructions (#1184)

Fixes:

• Ensure PGDATA permissions on bootstrap are properly set to 750 (#1164)
• Ensure that we create secrets and services only when not found (#1145)
• Respect configured pg-wal when restoring (#1216)
• Filter out replicas from nodeToClusters map (#1194)

Technical enhancements:

• Use ciclops for test summary (#1064): rely on the ciclops GitHub action to provide summaries of the E2E suite, inheriting improvements from that project
• Add backport pull request workflow (#965) - automatically backport patches to release branches if they are so annotated
• Make the operator log level configurable in e2e test suite (#1094)
• Enable test execution based on labels (#951)
• Update Go version from 1.18 to 1.19 (#1166)

Version 1.16.4

Release date: Nov 10, 2022

Security:

• Add SeccomProfile to Pods and Containers (#888)

Enhancements:

• status command for the cnpg plugin:
• Clarify display for fenced clusters (#886)
• Improve display for replica clusters (#871)
• Documentation:
• Improve monitoring page, providing instructions on how to evaluate the observability capabilities of CloudNativePG on a local system using Prometheus and Grafana (#968)
• Add page on design reasons for custom controller (#918)

Fixes:

• Import a database with plpgsql functions (#974)
• Properly find the closest backup when doing Point-in-time recovery (#949)
• Clarify that the ScheduledBackup format does not follow Kubernetes CronJob format (#883)
• Bases the failover logic on the Postgres information from the instance manager, rather than Kubernetes pod readiness, which could be stale (#890)
• Ensure we have a WAL to archive for every newly created cluster. The lack could prevent backups from working (#897)
• Correct YAML key names for barmanObjectStore in documentation (#877)
• Fix krew release (#866)

Version 1.16.3

Release date: Oct 6, 2022

Enhancements:

• Introduce leaseDuration and renewDeadline parameters in the controller manager to enhance configuration of the leader election in operator deployments (#759)
• Improve the mechanism that checks that the backup object store is empty before archiving a WAL file for the first time: a new file called .check-empty-wal-archive is placed in the PGDATA immediately after the cluster is bootstrapped and it is then removed after the first WAL file is successfully archived

Security:

• Explicitly set permissions of the instance manager binary that is copied in the distroless/static:nonroot container image, by using the nonroot:nonroot user (#754)

Fixes:

• Drop any active connection on a standby after it is promoted to primary (#737)
• Honor MAPPEDMETRIC and DURATION metric types conversion in the native Prometheus exporter (#765)

Version 1.16.2

Release date: Sep 6, 2022

Enhancements:

• Enable configuration of low-level network TCP settings in the PgBouncer connection pooler implementation (#584)
• Make sure that the cnpg.io/instanceName and the cnpg.io/podRole labels are always present on pods and PVCs (#632 and #680)
• Propagate the role label of an instance to the underlying PVC (#634)

Fixes:

• Use shared_preload_libraries when bootstrapping the new cluster's primary (#642)
• Prevent multiple in-place upgrade processes of the operator from running simultaneously by atomically checking whether another one is in progress (#655)
• Avoid using a hardcoded file name to store the newly uploaded instance manager, preventing a possible race condition during online upgrades of the operator (#660)
• Prevent a panic from happening when invoking GetAllAccessibleDatabases (#641)

Version 1.16.1

Release date: Aug 12, 2022

Enhancements:

• Enable the configuration of the huge_pages option for PostgreSQL (#456)
• Enhance log during promotion and demotion, after a failover or a switchover, by printing the time elapsed between the request of promotion and the actual availability for writes (#371)
• Introduce the PostgreSQL cluster’s timeline in the cluster status (#462)
• Add the instanceName and clusterName labels on jobs, pods, and PVCs to improve interaction with these resources (#534)
• Add instructions on how to create PostGIS clusters (#570)

Security:

• Explicitly assign securityContext to the Pooler deployment (#485)
• Add read timeout values to the internal web servers to prevent Slowloris DDoS (#437)

Fixes:

• Use the correct delays for restarts (stopDelay) and for switchover (switchoverDelay), as they were erroneously swapped before. This is an important fix, as it might block indefinitely restarts if switchoverDelay is not set and uses the default value of 40000000 seconds (#531)
• Prevent the metrics collector from causing panic when the query returns an error (#396)
• Removing an unsafe debug message that was referencing an unchecked pointer, leading in some cases to segmentation faults regardless of the log level (#491)
• Prevent panic when fencing in case the cluster had no annotation (#512)
• Avoid updating the CRD if a TLS certificate is not changed (#501)
• Handle conflicts while injecting a certificate in the CRD (#547)
• Database import:
  • Use the postgres user while running pg_restore in database import (#411)
  • Document the requirement to explicitly set sslmode in the monolith import case to control SSL connections with the origin external server (#572)
  • Fix bug that prevented import from working when dbname was specified in connectionParameters (#569)
• Backup and recovery:
  • Correctly pass object store credentials in Google Cloud (#454)

Minor changes:

• Set the default operand image to PostgreSQL 15.0

Version 1.16.0

Release date: Jul 7, 2022 (minor release)

Features:

• Offline data import and major upgrades for PostgreSQL: introduce the bootstrap.initdb.import section to provide a way to import objects via the network from an existing PostgreSQL instance (even outside Kubernetes) inside a brand new CloudNativePG cluster using the PostgreSQL logical backup concept (pg_dump/pg_restore). The same method can be used to perform major PostgreSQL upgrades on a new cluster. The feature introduces two types of import: microservice (import one database only in the new cluster) and monolith (import the selected databases and roles from the existing instance).
• Anti-affinity rules for synchronous replication based on labels: make sure that synchronous replicas are running on nodes with different characteristics than the node where the primary is running, for example, availability zone

Enhancements:

• Improve fencing by removing the existing limitation that disables failover when one or more instances are fenced
• Enhance the automated extension management framework by checking whether an extension exists in the catalog instead of running DROP EXTENSION IF EXISTS unnecessarily
• Improve logging of the instance manager during switchover and failover
• Enable redefining the name of the database of the application, its owner, and the related secret when recovering from an object store or cloning an instance via pg_basebackup (this was only possible in the initdb bootstrap so far)
• Backup and recovery:
  • Require Barman >= 3.0.0 for future support of PostgreSQL 15
  • Enable Azure AD Workload Identity for Barman Cloud backups through the inheritFromAzureAD option
  • Introduce barmanObjectStore.s3Credentials.region to define the region in AWS (AWS_DEFAULT_REGION) for both backup and recovery object stores
• Support for Kubernetes 1.24

Changes:

• Set the default operand image to PostgreSQL 15.0
• Use conditions from the Kubernetes API instead of relying on our own implementation for backup and WAL archiving

Fixes:

• Fix the initialization order inside the WithActiveInstance function that starts the CSV log pipe for the PostgreSQL server, ensuring proper logging in the cluster initialization phase - this is especially useful in bootstrap operations like recovery from a backup are failing (before this patch, such logs were not sent to the standard output channel and were permanently lost)
• Avoid an unnecessary switchover when a hot standby sensitive parameter is decreased, and the primary has already restarted
• Properly quote role names in ALTER ROLE statements
• Backup and recovery:
  • Fix the algorithm detecting the closest Barman backup for PITR, which was comparing the requested recovery timestamp with the backup start instead of the end
  • Fix Point in Time Recovery based on a transaction ID, a named restore point, or the “immediate” target by providing a new field called backupID in the recoveryTarget section
  • Fix encryption parameters invoking barman-cloud-wal-archive and barman-cloud-backup commands
  • Stop ignoring barmanObjectStore.serverName option when recovering from a backup object store using a server name that doesn’t match the current cluster name
• cnpg plug-in:
  • Make sure that the plug-in complies with the -n parameter when specified by the user
  • Fix the status command to sort results and remove variability in the output