Operator configuration v1

The operator for EDB Postgres for Kubernetes is installed from a standard deployment manifest and follows the convention over configuration paradigm. While this is fine in most cases, there are some scenarios where you want to change the default behavior, such as:

• setting a company license key that is shared by all deployments managed by the operator
• defining annotations and labels to be inherited by all resources created by the operator and that are set in the cluster resource
• defining a different default image for PostgreSQL or an additional pull secret

By default, the operator is installed in the postgresql-operator-system namespace as a Kubernetes Deployment called postgresql-operator-controller-manager.

The behavior of the operator can be customized through a ConfigMap/Secret that is located in the same namespace of the operator deployment and with postgresql-operator-controller-manager-config as the name.

Available options

The operator looks for the following environment variables to be defined in the ConfigMap/Secret:

Values in INHERITED_ANNOTATIONS and INHERITED_LABELS support path-like wildcards. For example, the value example.com/* will match both the value example.com/one and example.com/two.

When you specify an additional pull secret name using the PULL_SECRET_NAME parameter, the operator will use that secret to create a pull secret for every created PostgreSQL cluster. That secret will be named <cluster-name>-pull.

The namespace where the operator looks for the PULL_SECRET_NAME secret is where you installed the operator. If the operator is not able to find that secret, it will ignore the configuration parameter.

Defining an operator config map

The example below customizes the behavior of the operator, by defining a default license key (namely a company key), the label/annotation names to be inherited by the resources created by any Cluster object that is deployed at a later time, and by enabling in-place updates for the instance manager.

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: postgresql-operator-controller-manager-config
  namespace: postgresql-operator-system
data:
  INHERITED_ANNOTATIONS: categories
  INHERITED_LABELS: environment, workload, app
  ENABLE_INSTANCE_MANAGER_INPLACE_UPDATES: 'true'

Defining an operator secret

The example below customizes the behavior of the operator, by defining a default license key.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: postgresql-operator-controller-manager-config
  namespace: postgresql-operator-system
type: Opaque
data:
  EDB_LICENSE_KEY: <YOUR_BASE64_ENCODED_EDB_LICENSE_KEY_HERE>

Restarting the operator to reload configs

For the change to be effective, you need to recreate the operator pods to reload the config map. If you have installed the operator on Kubernetes using the manifest you can do that by issuing:

kubectl rollout restart deployment \
    -n postgresql-operator-system \
    postgresql-operator-controller-manager

Otherwise, If you have installed the operator using OLM, or you are running on Openshift, run the following command specifying the namespace the operator is installed in:

kubectl delete pods -n [NAMESPACE_NAME_HERE] \
  -l app.kubernetes.io/name=cloud-native-postgresql

Following the above example, if the Cluster definition contains a categories annotation and any of the environment, workload, or app labels, these will be inherited by all the resources generated by the deployment.

pprof HTTP Server

The operator can expose a PPROF HTTP server with the following endpoints on localhost:6060:

• /debug/pprof/. Responds to a request for "/debug/pprof/" with an HTML page listing the available profiles
• /debug/pprof/cmdline. Responds with the running program's command line, with arguments separated by NULL bytes.
• /debug/pprof/profile. Responds with the pprof-formatted cpu profile. Profiling lasts for duration specified in seconds GET parameter, or for 30 seconds if not specified.
• /debug/pprof/symbol. Looks up the program counters listed in the request, responding with a table mapping program counters to function names.
• /debug/pprof/trace. Responds with the execution trace in binary form. Tracing lasts for duration specified in seconds GET parameter, or for 1 second if not specified.

To enable the operator you need to edit the operator deployment add the flag --pprof-server=true.

You can do this by executing these commands:

kubectl edit deployment -n postgresql-operator-system postgresql-operator-controller-manager

Then on the edit page scroll down the container args and add --pprof-server=true, as in this example:

      containers:
      - args:
        - controller
        - --enable-leader-election
        - --config-map-name=postgresql-operator-controller-manager-config
        - --secret-name=postgresql-operator-controller-manager-config
        - --log-level=info
        - --pprof-server=true # relevant line
        command:
        - /manager

Save the changes; the deployment now will execute a roll-out, and the new pod will have the PPROF server enabled.

Once the pod is running you can exec inside the container by doing:

kubectl exec -ti -n postgresql-operator-system <pod name> -- bash

Once inside execute:

curl localhost:6060/debug/pprof/