Beyond the Version Bump: Running PostgreSQL Major Upgrades in Percona Operator for PostgreSQL - Percona

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It was quite challenging to perform postgres major upgrade, e.g., v17 to v18, in a Percona operator/K8s environment. There was no convenient approach to accomplish this task. The only viable solutions left were a Manual Dump/Restore to a new environment or using Logical replication.
But these options were not free from challenges. Procuring a new Infrastructure/Cluster or running the manual process is complex and error-prone. Logical replication has its own caveats; not everything can be replicated smoothly using the native logical option.
Moreover, performing a manual pg_upgrade (In-Place) in the Operator/K8S environment is risky and unsupported.
This problem was addressed effectively by our engineering team, and they released a technical release of the Major Upgrade option under Postgres Operator v2.4.0. After a couple of releases, the Major Upgrade feature finally became generally available (GA) under operator v2.9.0.
If you are still running a pretty old Operator version, it must be upgraded to at least the latest Operator v2.4.0-1 https://docs.percona.com/percona-operator-for-postgresql/3.0.0/update-operator.html to avail the “Major Upgrade” feature.
Let’s see, step by step and in detail, how we can accomplish the major upgrade.
Existing Operator/DB Environment:
Target Operator/DB Major Version:
We should always compare the complete patch version, as it might happen that we have the same Major/Minor version, say RHEL(8.x); however, the Patched version (8.x.x) is different and ultimately affects the underlying glibc. So even if only the patch version changes, we should take it seriously and verify the collation changes and, at a minimum, rebuild the indexes: https://docs.percona.com/percona-operator-for-postgresql/3.0.0/update-db-major.html#check-collation to avoid any corruption or consistency issues.
2. Now we will upgrade the Operator and CRD version from 2.4.0 → 2.5.1.
Once the rollout is complete, we can see the upgraded operator image to v2.5.1.