CloudNativePG 1.26.0 RC1 Released!

Gabriele Bartolini

March 28, 2025 • 3 minutes

The CloudNativePG Community is thrilled to announce the first release candidate of CloudNativePG 1.26! This preview release provides an opportunity to explore new features and enhancements before the final version is officially launched. While refinements may still occur, here’s a look at what’s new.

Key Features

Declarative Offline In-Place Major Upgrades of PostgreSQL

You can now trigger an offline in-place major upgrade by specifying a new operand container image with a higher PostgreSQL major version in a cluster, either directly or via image catalogs. During the upgrade, the cluster is shut down to ensure data consistency, and pg_upgrade is invoked to perform the migration. This long-awaited feature simplifies major upgrades while maintaining reliability.

Enhanced Startup and Readiness Probes for Replicas

We have improved Kubernetes startup and readiness probes for PostgreSQL instances, introducing a unique capability: the readiness of a replica can now be controlled based on its lag from the primary. For example, this allows you to ensure that only synchronous replicas with no lag are considered ready for promotion, improving high availability management.

Declarative Management of Extensions and Schemas

The Database resource now supports ensuring the presence of one or more extensions in a database and managing their versions. Additionally, you can declaratively define the existence of SCHEMA objects within a PostgreSQL database.

Important Changes

Starting with this version, we are deprecating native support for Barman Cloud on object stores. But don’t worry—we’ve got you covered! We provide clear instructions on how to seamlessly migrate your existing clusters to the new Barman Cloud Plugin. A new resource, BarmanObjectStore, will replace the .spec.barmanObjectStore stanza, incorporating the .spec.backup.retentionPolicy option.

In CloudNativePG 1.28, Barman Cloud will be fully removed from CloudNativePG’s core, making the plugin the only community-supported method for continuous backup on object stores. You have until then to complete your migration.

This marks a significant milestone in CloudNativePG’s evolution—the culmination of a multi-year effort that introduced CNPG-I, our extensible plugin interface. It is a crucial step toward making CloudNativePG a backup-agnostic solution while also enabling leaner operand images by removing the need to bundle Barman Cloud directly.

Additionally, in version 1.26, the hibernate command of the plugin now leverages the declarative hibernation capability. Instead of executing an imperative hibernation process that destroyed replica PVCs, it will now annotate the cluster, aligning with CloudNativePG’s declarative approach.

Get Involved and Make a Difference!

This release candidate offers a unique opportunity to test the new features in your environment before the final release. Although not recommended for production use, simulating your workloads can help uncover potential issues and validate feature stability.

Your feedback is vital to ensuring that CloudNativePG 1.26 maintains its reputation as the premier Kubernetes operator for PostgreSQL.

Learn more about testing and contributing!

There’s More…

Explore other improvements in this release, including:

A new annotation to enable/disable webhook validation.
A configuration option to set the TCP timeout for replicas, improving failover recovery speed.
Integration with autoscalers like Karpenter for better node drain management.

Dive into the full details in the release notes for 1.26 RC1.

Testing

The stability of each CloudNativePG release relies on the community’s engagement. Testing your workloads with this release candidate helps identify bugs and regressions early.

View the open issues for the 1.26 release.
Report bugs directly on GitHub.

Release Timeline

CloudNativePG 1.26 RC1 is the first in a series of release candidates. Additional RCs may follow as needed before the final release, currently planned in the second half of April 2025.