YAML Is My DBA Now: Our Postgres Journey From DIY To Autopilot Self-Service - David Pech, Wrike

David Pech shares Wrike's journey of running PostgreSQL on Kubernetes, moving from manual setups to autopilot self-service using CloudNativePG.

Don't miss out! Join us at our next Flagship Conference: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon events in Amsterdam, The Netherlands (23-26 March, 2026). Connect with our current graduated, incubating, and sandbox projects as the community gathers to further the education and advancement of cloud native computing. Learn more at kubecon.io YAML Is My DBA Now: Our Postgres Journey From DIY To Autopilot Self-Service - David Pech, Wrike They told us, “Don’t run databases on Kubernetes.” We heard, “Challenge accepted.” This is the story of how we went from handcrafted Postgres chaos to a stable, CNCF-aligned DBaaS using CloudNativePG over the years — and lived to tell the tale. We started with containers, then pinned nodes in Kubernetes (spoiler: not scalable). Zalando’s operator with Patroni got us partway, but the real leap came with CloudNativePG: rebuilt from scratch, capable of autopilot. You’ll hear real incidents (yes, including “the one with the wrong PVC”), lessons learned, and how we’ve moved from tickets to self-service via GitOps. So what happens when YAML becomes your new DBA? This is a story of maturity, simplicity, real benefits CNCF brings to your project. Not just from a single project, but from the whole ecosystem evolving over the years in networking, deployment, and much more. Whether you're building a platform or escaping vendor lock-in, come laugh, learn, and reconsider running DBs in Kubernetes.