Running PostgreSQL in Kubernetes with CloudNativePG
Presented by:
Danish
Danish is a Database on Kubernetes (DoK) Ambassador and a CloudNativePG contributor. A dual-certified CKA and CKAD, he has spent his career as an Infrastructure Consultant and Automation Engineer, mastering performance engineering and cloud-native stability. Danish is currently focused on leveraging Go, Ginkgo development, and Chaos Engineering to bring enterprise-grade PostgreSQL reliability and stability to the Kubernetes ecosystem and users.
Neelkumar Patel
I am working as Principal Engineer at EnterpriseDB having 17+ years of experience. I am working with PostgreSQL since ~11 years. I am Open source contributor for various tools around PostgreSQL for monitoring and management. I specialize in building cloud-native, scalable systems with expertise across Kubernetes, Golang, monitoring technologies, and cloud-native PostgreSQL. My work focuses on designing resilient platforms, improving observability, and enabling efficient application development in modern distributed environments. At EnterpriseDB, I am focusing on EDB Postgres AI Hybrid Manager which is built to leverage Kubernetes for orchestration and CloudNativePG for managing the lifecycle of the PostgreSQL.
In this hands-on, 3-hour workshop, participants will learn how to deploy and manage PostgreSQL in Kubernetes using CloudNativePG (CNPG), the open source operator in the CNCF sandbox. The workshop will walk through the main features to manage a PostgreSQL cluster, from deploying the first CNPG cluster to managing configuration, databases, and roles in a declarative way,Extensions Management, to enabling continuous backups for recovery from a disaster.
Attendees will manage the PostgreSQL cluster by applying the changes from the YAML manifest definition, demonstrating the declarative nature of the Operator. We will cover basic DBA managements, from DB initialization, to declarative SQL execution and DB import from other PG source, to reading the aggregated logs for investigation. Moreover we will show the benefits of using the CNPG operator for taking and restoring backups, and for its self-healing capabilities in case of incidents. This session is ideal for DevOps engineers, DBAs, and developers looking to operationalize PostgreSQL in Kubernetes.
Following the instructions from the CNPG Playground project, anyone will create Kubernetes clusters on their own laptop using “kind”.
While the kind clusters will be created on each laptop, we will introduce the CNPG operator and basic concepts. We will walk the attendees to understand a bit of the Kubernetes world and the problems we are trying to solve with this PostgreSQL operator.
The course will cover the following points:
- Introduction to CloudNativePG (CNPG)
- Installation of the kubectl plugin for CNPG
- First deployment of a CNPG cluster
- PostgreSQL configuration, databases, and roles management
- Database import
- Setup and execution of the first backup
- PostgreSQL Extensions
- Incident simulation (failover showcase)
- Log reading
- Upgrade of the Operator and the PostgreSQL version (minor, and major)
- Restore from a backup.
To speed up the process, we will provide a link to download all the commands to actually follow the workshop in real time, without wasting precious minutes writing them or looking for typos in case of issues.
- Date:
- 2026 April 22 13:00 PDT
- Duration:
- 3 h
- Room:
- Almaden Ballroom
- Conference:
- Postgres Conference: 2026
- Language:
- Track:
- Ops
- Difficulty:
- Easy