At FOSS Asia 2026 (Mar 8-10, Bangkok), note 4:
Running a stateful service like a database on Kubernetes has historically been considered risky — too much operational complexity around failover, backups, and persistent storage. However, the ecosystem has matured significantly.
I saw two particularly interesting pieces of software for running databases on K8s, both aiming to make PostgreSQL setups in Kubernetes easier to maintain, declarative, and highly available:
CloudNativePG#
There was a great talk: “Run PostgreSQL on Kubernetes in Production with CloudNativePG”.
CloudNativePG is an open-source Kubernetes operator that covers the full lifecycle of a highly available PostgreSQL database cluster. It uses a primary/standby architecture with native streaming replication.
The beauty of CloudNativePG is that it handles the operational tasks that make running PostgreSQL on K8s painful — automated failover when a primary goes down, rolling updates without downtime, scheduled backups to object storage, TLS certificate management, and replica scaling. Because it’s completely declarative and relies on the Kubernetes API server to maintain the state, you don’t need external failover management tools like Patroni or repmgr.
OpenEverest (from Solanica)#
Another interesting project I stumbled upon at the Solanica stand in the exhibition area was OpenEverest.
OpenEverest is an open-source platform from Solanica for automated database provisioning and management. While CloudNativePG is specifically focused on PostgreSQL, OpenEverest takes a broader DBaaS (Database-as-a-Service) approach. It supports multiple database technologies (including PostgreSQL) and can be hosted on any Kubernetes infrastructure—whether in the cloud or on-premises.
If you are running a larger internal platform and want to offer a self-service DB portal to your developers, tools like OpenEverest aim to simplify that exact problem.
The Takeaway#
Running PostgreSQL on Kubernetes is no longer a fringe idea. If you just need PostgreSQL on K8s — CloudNativePG is the focused, battle-tested choice. If you’re building an internal platform where developers need to self-service multiple database engines — OpenEverest is worth evaluating.