Gabriele Bartolini

October 12, 2023 • 2 minutes

The CloudNativePG Community has announced version 1.21.0, a new minor release of the CloudNativePG Operator, which introduces volume snapshot support for backup and recovery along several enhancements in the default behavior in terms of usability, security and resilience.

By leveraging the standard Kubernetes API on Volume Snapshots, you can now take advantage of capabilities like incremental and differential copy for both backup and recovery operations of PostgreSQL databases, opening up the frontier of very large databases (VLDB). CloudNativePG is the first PostgreSQL operator that natively supports Kubernetes volume snapshots. This implementation covers cold backups from a standby, waiting for 1.22 to complete the feature with hot backups using the PostgreSQL API.

CloudNativePG 1.21 also introduces support for Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM) via OperatorHub.io (through the stable channel, which is limited to the latest patch version of the latest minor release). Many thanks to EDB for donating the bundle of their “EDB Postgres for Kubernetes” operator and adapting it for CloudNativePG.

As an exceptional measure, some important changes to the default behavior of the operator have been made in this release with the goal to keep improving the out-of-the-box usability, security and resilience of the operator. The most relevant changes on new PostgreSQL clusters are:

network access as postgres superuser is forbidden unless requested, for better security-by-default (1.21.0 only)
replication slots for the High Availability cluster are enabled by default, improving resilience (1.21.0 only)
more realistic default values for timeouts and delays that control start, stop, switchover, and fencing operations, suitable for most production environments (all patch releases).

We apologize with our existing users for any inconvenience but, as the user base of CloudNativePG keeps expanding, postponing them would have generated more issues in the long term. Before upgrading, please make sure you read the detailed instructions.

New patch releases are available for all the supported versions, including 1.20.3 and 1.19.5.

Before of the above changes, we recommend to upgrade at your earliest possible convenience to 1.21.0, or, alternatively, at least to the latest patch version for your current minor release.

With the release of 1.21.0, the 1.19.x minor version will be end of life from 11 November, 2023.

Several bugs have also been fixed.

For a complete list of changes, please refer to: