CloudNativePG Reaches its Next Milestone: CNCF Incubation

We have news to share: CloudNativePG (CNPG), the open source project that helps companies run Postgres reliably on Kubernetes, has been has been accepted into Incubation by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Here’s what that means and why it matters to us at EDB.

What is CNPG? 

Postgres is one of the world’s most popular databases. It stores and organizes the information that applications depend on, from banking records to online orders.

Kubernetes is a technology that many companies use to run their software. Think of it as an automated manager that keeps applications running, restarts them if something goes wrong, and scales them up when demand grows.

CloudNativePG (CNPG) connects the two. It’s a free, open source operator that lets you manage Postgres on Kubernetes, handling tasks like failover, backups, and updates automatically so teams don’t have to do them by hand.

What is the CNCF, and what is “Incubation”?

The CNCF is a vendor-neutral foundation that supports many of the open source technologies behind modern software, including Kubernetes itself. It doesn’t belong to any single company.

The CNCF ranks projects by maturity:

• Sandbox: Early-stage projects with promise
• Incubation: Projects with proven production use, a healthy contributor base, a clear governance model, and a solid security posture
• Graduation: The highest tier, with broad adoption, diverse maintainers, and a security audit

Moving up isn’t automatic. A project must go through a public review in which independent experts examine how it’s used, how it’s run, and how it’s secured. CNPG passed that review, and is now one step away from Graduation, the highest tier, which helps a project reach the late majority of enterprise adopters, not only early ones.

Why this matters

Choosing a database technology is a big decision. Teams naturally ask: Will this project still be here in five years? Is it controlled by one company? Can we trust it?

Incubation answers those questions with a vendor-neutral stamp of maturity. It tells organizations that CNPG is used in real production environments and has a healthy governance model, with contributions from many different organizations. That makes it easier for enterprises to adopt, and it removes the “single-vendor risk” concern that often slows decisions down.

Trust for regulated industries: Banks, financial technology companies, and government agencies hold the software behind their most important systems to a high standard. Incubation is an independent review showing that CNPG meets a high bar for production use and security. It also shows that running Postgres on Kubernetes, once seen as experimental, is now an accepted approach for enterprise workloads.

No lock-in: Because the project is open source and vendor neutral, customers can build on it without worrying about being tied to a single vendor. Teams weighing proprietary cloud database services often raise exactly that concern.

CNPG by the numbers

CNPG became an open source project in 2022. Since then, adoption has grown quickly:

• Downloads: The main CNPG container image has been downloaded about 250 million times, up from roughly 25 million at the end of 2023.
• GitHub stars: Starting from about 600 at the end of 2022, the project passed 2,500 in late 2023, reached 4,900 at the start of 2025, and now has more than 9,500.
• Contributors: The CNCF’s project insights count 4,684 contributors from 1,699 organizations, up 16% and 17% from the previous year.
• Activity: The project had close to 880 commits in 2025 alone, and more than 5,300 in total on the main repository.
• Project health: The Linux Foundation Insights page gives the project a health score of 86, which it rates as excellent.

What users say: Organizations such as Docaposte, Enix, and ParadeDB publicly list it in their production setups, and Swisscom has a published case study with the CNCF.

These are the production adoption and community health signals the CNCF looks for at the Incubation level.

Why this is special for EDB

EDB created CloudNativePG and still co-develops it today, so this recognition is personal for us. Years ago, running a production database on Kubernetes was seen as risky, because databases hold state and Kubernetes was initially built for stateless workloads. We bet on a different vision: a Postgres database that lives natively in the containerized world and is managed by Kubernetes itself, like everything else. Many people thought that was impossible, but Incubation shows it works.

It also validates the open source foundation underneath our commercial Kubernetes offering, EDB Postgres AI for CloudNativePG Cluster. Incubation strengthens our credibility as a leader in running Postgres on Kubernetes. It also confirms EDB’s role as a steward of the open, cloud-native Postgres standard.

Where we go from here

Incubation is a milestone, not the finish line. CloudNativePG’s plans for the next phase focus on three areas:

• Balanced governance: Over the next six months, the project aims to introduce a voting system for the project’s Steering Committee that limits each company to a maximum of two seats. This is meant to make the project’s shared governance across companies clear and to settle any remaining perception that one vendor controls it.
• Clear technical focus: The two-seat limit applies to the Steering Committee. EDB will continue to provide technical leadership for the core operator itself. A growing ecosystem of tools around CloudNativePG can increasingly be maintained by the wider community, which lets EDB engineers concentrate on operator performance, enterprise features, and technical quality.
• Graduation: We plan to support our engineers who are CloudNativePG maintainers in applying for CNCF Graduation in 2027 and aim to complete it during 2028.

Thank you

This milestone belongs to the whole community: the maintainers, contributors, and adopters who have made CloudNativePG what it is. We’re grateful to every one of them.

What’s next

We’ll be celebrating at KubeCon North America in Salt Lake City, and we’d love to see you there. Incubation also lets the project apply to host an official co-located event, CloudNativePG Day, at KubeCon. If you’d like to try CloudNativePG, learn more about EDB’s offerings, or get involved in the project, CNPG and EDB Postgres AI for CNPG are good places to start.