November 13, 2025

KubeCon is always a whirlwind of innovation, but this year, one theme has dominated our booth conversations: the maturity of running stateful workloads. Specifically, PostgreSQL on Kubernetes.

The days of struggling to deploy and manage production databases inside Kubernetes are officially over, and the reason is clear: CloudNativePG.

The Proof is on the Floor (and in the Code)

The level of relief and excitement we’ve heard from platform and DevOps engineers this week has been overwhelming. A few conversations, in particular, perfectly capture why the CloudNativePG operator has quickly become the community and enterprise favorite.

One engineer approached the EDB booth and said:

“Thank you for creating CNPG. It’s been a real nightmare running PostgreSQL in containers. Now we can focus more on the application side of things.”

This quote sums it up. Complex tasks—like managing failover, continuous backups, and high availability (HA) with traditional tools—are simply not Kubernetes-native. CloudNativePG abstracts that complexity by leveraging the Kubernetes Operator pattern, allowing teams to manage their critical data with simple, declarative YAML, the way Kubernetes intended.

Another visitor put it even more succinctly, naming the project’s ascendance:

“CNPG is the gold standard for Postgres on Kubernetes.”

Official Validation: Microsoft Adopts CloudNativePG on AKS

The real validation of this community consensus arrived today in the form of updated guidance from one of the world’s leading cloud providers.

Microsoft has announced its “newly updated guidance on deploying PostgreSQL with CloudNativePG on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).”

This announcement marks a significant milestone: CloudNativePG now officially anchors Microsoft’s recommended pattern for running production-ready PostgreSQL on AKS. This is not a casual recommendation; it is an endorsement of the operator’s stability, security, and cloud-native architecture.

The new guidance incorporates the latest best practices, detailing how CloudNativePG is essential for:

• Production Readiness: Aligning container image catalogs, ensuring safer operator rollouts, and configuring the Barman Cloud backup tool to meet availability targets from day one.
• Operational Excellence: Showing teams how to tune the CNPG controller, set up self-managed PodMonitors for observability with Prometheus and Grafana, and leverage AKS workload identity for secure backup and restore flows.
• Resilience: Demonstrating how to exercise failover across Azure availability zones—a non-trivial Day-2 operation that CNPG simplifies through its native integration with Kubernetes primitives.

Why is CloudNativePG the Gold Standard?

The operator’s success—cemented by community adoption and now recognized by hyperscalers—comes down to a few core principles that resonate deeply with cloud-native practitioners:

Kubernetes-Native Design: CNPG was built by PostgreSQL experts to live inside Kubernetes, not just run on top of it. It uses Kubernetes’ own API for cluster status and failover, eliminating reliance on external management tools and complex configuration layers.

Declarative Simplicity: It embraces the “GitOps-driven CI/CD” philosophy. You declare the desired state of your highly available PostgreSQL cluster (including replicas, backups, and security), and the operator handles the rest, automating the complex Day 1 and Day 2 operational tasks.

Vendor-Neutral Community: Although originally developed by EDB, CloudNativePG is a CNCF Sandbox project that just applied for the Incubation level. It is 100% open source under the Apache 2.0 license and is governed by a vendor-neutral community. This fosters the widespread trust and rapid development needed to truly become a community standard.

If you are looking to simplify your operations and focus more on application innovation—just like the engineer we met at KubeCon—it’s time to move beyond the complexity and embrace the gold standard.

If you need production support for CloudNativePG on AKS, reach out to EDB or visit their offering on the Azure Marketplace. As the stewards of the operator, EDB offers services and subscriptions that pair well with the deployment guidance so you can keep your clusters compliant, tuned, and ready for future CNPG releases.

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