CloudNativePG: The Most Popular Postgres Operator in 2023

December 18, 2023

Timescale has just announced the results of its 2023 State of PostgreSQL survey, the fourth of its kind, with responses from almost 900 individuals. As proud partners of this initiative, EDB is pleased to share some key findings that shed light on the dynamic landscape of this database engine.

The 2023 report revealed some important insights for PostgreSQL adoption, including:

  • 23.7% of respondents have been using PostgreSQL for less than two years,  8% of which for less than a year say that Postgres, despite its 30+ years history, is still a modern and dynamic database engine capable of attracting new users
  • PostgreSQL’s usage in organizations is on the rise: 51.2% of respondents said that they use the open source database more or a lot more today than a year ago
  • Open source is the primary reason for choosing PostgreSQL for almost one respondent out of four
  • With respect of AI workloads, 37.7% of respondents use the pgvector extension to keep vectorial and relational data in the same database
  • 8.5% of respondents deploy PostgreSQL in Kubernetes

For the second time in a row, the survey contains a question about how Postgres is deployed inside Kubernetes. While 28.9% of respondents still rely on Helm chart deployment of Postgres containers, more than one out of four respondents declared to rely on CloudNativePG to run Postgres inside Kubernetes.

CloudNativePG, a production ready operator originally created by EDB and open sourced in May 2022, jumped from 6.1% of shares in 2022 (3rd position) to 27.6% in this year’s survey. This makes it the most popular operator, surpassing competitors like Stackgres (13.2%) and Zalando (7.9%).

CloudNativePG's meteoric rise is evident not only in download statistics (25 million downloads) but also in GitHub stargazers, boasting over 2500 stars compared to 600 a year ago.

The operator's popularity is further solidified by its recent introduction of native support for Kubernetes volume snapshot backup and recovery, capable of restoring a 4.5 TB database in just minutes.

The upcoming 1.22 release will contain declarative tablespaces, another important feature that will enhance vertical scalability of Postgres databases. When used in conjunction with Postgres’ table partitioning, declarative tablespaces provide an unprecedented way to run data warehousing and VLDB in Kubernetes, a critical path towards AI data integration.

As Silver Members of the CNCF, EDB is committed to making Postgres the #1 database in Kubernetes and making Kubernetes the #1 platform for Postgres usage for the foreseeable future. For this reason, EDB is providing CloudNativePG for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and GKE Autopilot with 24/7 professional support, directly from the Google Marketplace.

On top of developing and maintaining the open source CloudNativePG operator, EDB provides professional support on the open source Kubernetes & PostgreSQL stack. For those organizations that need longer support windows, the EDB Postgres for Kubernetes operator, based on CloudNativePG, is a superset for which EDB maintains a Long Term Support (LTS) release, extending the community support period (normally 6 months). Moreover, EDB Postgres for Kubernetes gives you access to EDB Postgres Advanced Server (EPAS), with Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) and the Oracle compatibility layer.

CloudNativePG is at the heart of two strategic products for EDB: the EDB Postgres Distributed for Kubernetes operator for multi-master database access, and BigAnimal, EDB’s Database as a Service platform, available on every major cloud provider.

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