Release notes for CloudNativePG 1.23

History of user-visible changes in the 1.23 minor release of CloudNativePG.

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

Version 1.23.4

Release date: Aug 22, 2024

Enhancements:

• cnpg plugin updates:
  • Enhance the install generate command by adding a --control-plane option, allowing deployment of the operator on control-plane nodes by setting node affinity and tolerations (#5271).
  • Enhance the destroy command to delete also any job related to the target instance (#5298).

Fixes:

• Synchronous replication self-healing checks now exclude terminated pods, focusing only on active and functional pods (#5210).
• The instance manager will now terminate all existing operator-related replication connections following a role change in a replica cluster (#5209).
• Allow setting smartShutdownTimeout to zero, enabling immediate fast shutdown and bypassing the smart shutdown process when required (#5347).

Version 1.23.3

Release date: Jul 29, 2024

Enhancements:

• Add transparent support for PostgreSQL 17's allow_alter_system parameter, enabling or disabling the ALTER SYSTEM command through the .spec.postgresql.enableAlterSystem option (#4921).
• Introduce the reconcilePodSpec annotation on the Cluster and Pooler resources to control the restart of pods following a change in the Pod specification (#5069).
• Support the new metrics introduced in PgBouncer 1.23 in the Pooler metrics collector (#5044).

Fixes:

• Enhance the mechanism for detecting Pods that have been terminated but not deleted during an eviction process, and extend the cleanup process during maintenance windows to include unschedulable Pods when the reusePVC flag is set to false (#2056).
• Disable pg_rewind execution for newly created replicas that employ VolumeSnapshot during bootstrapping to avoid introducing a new shutdown checkpoint entry in the WAL files. This ensures that replicas can reconnect to the primary without issues, which would otherwise be hindered by the additional checkpoint entry (#5081).
• Gracefully handle failures during the initialization of a new instance. Any remaining data from the failed initialization is now either removed or, if it's a valid PostgreSQL data directory, moved to a backup location to avoid possible data loss (#5112).
• Enhance the robustness of the immediate backups reconciler by implementing retry logic upon initial backup failure (#4982).
• Wait for the postmaster to shut down before starting it again (#4938).
• Ensure that the Pooler service template can override the default service (#4846).
• Exclude immutable databases from pg_database metric monitoring and alerting processes (#4980).
• Removed unnecessary permissions from the operator service account (#4911).
• Fix cluster role permissions for ClusterImageCatalogs (#5034).
• Ensure the operator initiates a rollout of the Pooler instance when the operator image is upgraded (#5006)
• Address race condition causing the readiness probe to incorrectly show "not ready" after a PostgreSQL restart, even when the postmaster was accessible (#4920).
• Prevent reconciliation of resources that aren't owned by a Pooler (#4967).
• Renew the certificates managed by the operator when the DNS Subject Alternative Names (SANs) are updated (#3269, #3319).
• Set PVC default AccessModes in the template only when unspecified (#4845).
• Gracefully handle unsatisfiable backup schedule (#5109).
• cnpg plugin:
• Properly handle errors during the status command execution.
• Support TLS in the status command (#4915).

Version 1.23.2

Release date: Jun 12, 2024

Enhancements:

• Enabled configuration of standby-sensitive parameters during recovery using a physical backup (#4564)

• Enabled the configuration of the liveness probe timeout via the .spec.livenessProbeTimeout option (#4719)

• cnpg plugin for kubectl:

  • Enhanced support for ANSI colors in the plugin by adding the --color option, which accepts always, never, and auto (default) as values (#4775)
  • The plugin is now available on Homebrew for macOS users (#4602)

Fixes:

• Prevented fenced instances from entering an unnecessary loop and consuming all available CPU (#4625)

• Resolved an issue where the instance manager on the primary would indefinitely wait for the instance to start after encountering a failure following a stop operation (#4434)

• Fixed an issue where the interaction between hot_standby_feedback and managed cluster-level replication slots was preventing the autovacuum from operating correctly; this issue was causing disk space to remain occupied by dead tuples (#4811)

• Fixed a panic in the backup controller that occurred when pod container statuses were missing (#4765)

• Prevented unnecessary shutdown of the instance manager (#4670)

• Prevented unnecessary reloads of PostgreSQL configuration when unchanged (#4531)

• Prevented unnecessary reloads of the ident map by ensuring a consistent and unique method of writing its content (#4648)

• Avoided conflicts during phase registration by patching the status of the resource instead of updating it (#4637)

• Implemented a timeout when restarting PostgreSQL and lifting fencing (#4504)

• Ensured that a replica cluster is restarted after promotion to properly set the archive mode (#4399)

• Removed an unneeded concurrent keep-alive routine that was causing random failures in volume snapshot backups (#4768)

• Ensured correct parsing of the additional rows field returned when the pgaudit.log_rows option was enabled, preventing audit logs from being incorrectly routed to the normal log stream (#4394)

• cnpg plugin for kubectl:

  • Resolved an issue with listing PDBs using the cnpg status command (#4530)

Changes

• Default operand image set to PostgreSQL 16.3 (#4584)
• Removed all RBAC requirements on namespace objects (#4753)

Version 1.23.1

Release date: Apr 29, 2024

Fixes:

• Corrects the reconciliation of PodMonitor resources, which was failing due to a regression (#4286)

Version 1.23.0

Release date: Apr 24, 2024

Features:

• PostgreSQL Image Catalogs: Introduced ClusterImageCatalog and ImageCatalog CRDs to manage operand container images based on PostgreSQL major version. This is facilitated through the Cluster's .spec.imageCatalogRef stanza. This feature provides an alternative to the imageName option and will eventually replace it as the default method to define operand container images.
• User-Defined Replication Slots: Enhanced the synchronization of physical replication slots to cover user-defined replication slots on the primary, via the newly introduced stanza replicationSlots.synchronizeReplicas.
• Configuration of Pod Disruption Budgets (PDB): Introduced the .spec.enablePDB field to disable PDBs on the primary instance, allowing proper eviction of the pod during maintenance operations. This is particularly useful for single-instance deployments. This feature is intended to replace the node maintenance window feature.

Enhancements:

• Users now have the capability to transition an existing cluster into replica mode, simplifying cross-datacenter switchover operations (#4261)
• Users can now customize the connection pooler service, including its type, labels, and annotations (#3384)
• Users can now configure the wal_log_hints PostgreSQL parameter (#4218) (#4218)
• Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDN) in URIs for automatically generated secrets (#4095)
• Cleanup of instance Pods not owned by the Cluster during Cluster restore (#4141)
• Command output of the plugin’s status command to show the status of PDBs (#4319)
• Error detection when invoking barman-cloud-wal-restore in recovery bootstrap (#4101)

Fixes:

• Ensured that before a switchover, the elected replica is in streaming replication (#4288)
• Correctly handle parsing errors of instances' LSN when sorting them (#4283)
• Recreate the primary Pod if there are no healthy standbys available to promote (#4132)
• Cleanup PGDATA in case of failure of the restore job (#4151)
• Reload certificates on configuration update (#3705)
• cnpg plugin for kubectl:
  • Improve the arguments handling of destroy, fencing, and promote plugin commands (#4280)
  • Correctly handle the percentage of the backup progress in cnpg status (#4131)
  • Gracefully handle databases with no sequences in sync-sequences command (#4346)

Changes:

• Operator images are now based on gcr.io/distroless/static-debian12:nonroot (#4201)
• The Grafana dashboard now resides at https://github.com/cloudnative-pg/grafana-dashboards (#4154)