Introducing Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes 5.8: OpenTelemetry, API enhancements, UBI-9 and More

Today's release of Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes, version 5.8, is a substantial update that introduces a range of features designed to revolutionize your data infrastructure and observability. Whether you are a seasoned DevOps engineer, a database administrator, or an application developer seeking a reliable Postgres environment, this version offers enhancements to streamline your workflows and enhance the overall efficiency of your deployments.

The developer-focused improvements are:

• Enhanced Monitoring and Insights: OpenTelemetry integration provides faster troubleshooting and improved performance tuning.
• Strengthened Security and Reliability: UBI-9 based containers enhance security and offer regular patches.
• Simplified API & YAML: improved experience for Postgres configuration.

Enhanced Observability with OpenTelemetry

By embracing OpenTelemetry, Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes 5.8 simplifies the process of setting up disparate monitoring tools, freeing up your time to focus more on important issues than shipping logs and metrics. A variety of OTel services and backends are deployed along-side Postgres for a new observability system based on OpenTelemetry. Installation, configuration and maintenance happens automatically, and aggregates all logs and metrics generated by all the components in real time. This integration leverages the robust capabilities of pgMonitor, which also enables streaming logs and metrics to other systems. This new approach enables easy setup of cross-platform monitoring and analysis, ensuring a unified view of your Postgres infrastructure.

UBI-9 Based Containers

Red Hat Universal Base Image 9 (UBI 9) containers are shipped to enhance security and reliability. UBI 9 delivers an updated security architecture with a stable, consistently patched foundation, seamless compatibility across diverse environments. An efficient update pipeline ensures you're always protected with the latest critical patches and enhancements. Choosing to switch to UBI-9 helps maintain the security and compliance of your application environment today and in the future. UBI 9 also may have better overall performance than UBI 8 due to changes in the libraries, memory usage, and files system.

Enhanced Postgres Configuration Experience

When managing a Postgres cluster, you want to be confident that the database server has been configured according to your specific needs. And should you make a configuration mistake, you want to be aware of that mistake as soon as possible. There is nothing worse than thinking your database is properly configured, only to find out later that it is not!

Thanks to two great new enhancements to the PostgresCluster API, you can be more confident than ever that custom Postgres configuration settings have been successfully applied to a Postgres cluster. The new spec.config.parameters section now provides a better way for providing custom configuration parameters, and the new spec.authentication section now provides a better way for providing custom client authentication settings. Both improve validation, while providing an intuitive user experience for settings.

Let's look at a common misconfiguration, and attempt to customize the Postgres port. While the spec.port field is the proper way to configure this setting in the PostgresCluster spec, many initially try to configure ports using the Postgres parameter.  The wrong configuration is as follows:

spec:
  patroni:
    dynamicConfiguration:
      postgresql:
        parameters:
          port: 5555

Previously, unless you're paying close attention to the logs of your database Pod, you can easily miss that the change fails silently with the following warning:

WARNING: postgresql parameter port=5555 failed validation, defaulting to None

With the 5.8 update, now try to make the same change within the spec.config.parameters section of the PostgresCluster spec:

spec:
  config:
    parameters:
      port: 5555

When attempting to apply the change, not only is the setting rejected, but it tells you exactly how the port should be configured!

The PostgresCluster "hippo" is invalid: spec.config.parameters: Invalid value: "object": change port using .spec.port instead

This points you back to the right track to configure the Postgres port the proper way:

spec:
  port: 5555

Upgrade

Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes builds on our experience running Postgres in Kubernetes. The additional features simplify previously complex experiences, and increase your chance of success.

• See our full release notes
• See our documentation for details on the upgrade process.

If you require more details or hands-on guidance, please visit Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes documentation or contact our account team. Also, Join our Discord community forums to connect with other users and share your experiences.