Make Postgres Yours Again

We all loved self-hosting Postgres. We had control of everything: the hardware where it runs, the datacenter, the OS, the configuration, everything. We could access via SSH, install tools, extensions, validate our backups. But it was hard and manual.

Then the cloud managed Postgres came. Incredibly convenient, polished experience. Not too much expertise required. But we relinquished control. Cannot access the server, cannot install random tools. Cannot access backups or replication (for the most part). Tied to a given vendor. And quite expensive. We traded freedom for conveniency.

But Postgres is about open source and freedom. We need to bring this back. Join this inspirational talk to understand how we can make our Postgres ours again.

Transcript

1. Make Postgres Yours again. Álvaro Hernández @ahachete
2. — DISCLAIMER — This talk is not about politics
3. Just Postgres
4. Álvaro Hernández Founder, OnGres. I build StackGres, one of the Postgres-on-Kubernetes platforms. This isn't a vendor talk. It's a direction.
5. Postgres is what it is because it is open. Features. Extensions. Reliability. Community.
6. Yet much of production Postgres today is proprietary.. You get the engine. You don't get the open part.
7. The self-hosting era. Our own Postgres. Our own datacenter. On our own VMs. With the software we wanted.
8. Control came with a tax. Expertise. Time. Operational burden. Not a weekend project: a real discipline.
9. Production Postgres is a Stack. 01 HA & failover RABBIT HOLE 02 Connection pooling RABBIT HOLE 03 Backups & PITR RABBIT HOLE 04 Monitoring & alerting RABBIT HOLE 05 WAL archiving RABBIT HOLE 06 Version upgrades RABBIT HOLE
10. IaC helped. It didn't save us. Ansible · Terraform · Chef · Puppet. Automate but strong dependency on the environment. No reproducibility guarantees.
11. Then came DBaaS. And, honestly it's great. A few clicks / CLI / API calls. A production-ready cluster. I recommend it myself frequently.
12. Convenience wins markets. Little knowledge required. Ship on Monday. Business happy: “The cloud manages Postgres for us.”
13. “They manage it for us”
14. Not humans. Software. Software that, a decade ago, didn't exist in open source. But it does in 2026.
15. No free lunch. What did we trade?
16. SELF-HOSTED · VS · MANAGED DBAAS SELF-HOSTED MANAGED DBAAS Cost Cloud/hardware + ops 80%+ markup over raw compute Server placement Anywhere: cloud, region, on-prem Vendor's regions only Data sovereignty Yours Provider + their jurisdiction Raw data / WAL access Full Blocked or crippled Custom extensions Install anything Vendor-approved list only Custom tooling Full SSH, anything goes None Lock-in None High: migration off is hard
17. Same machine. Two prices. MONTHLY, ON-DEMAND m8g.8xlarge Self-hosted on EC2 $1,077 /mo vs. db.m8g.8xlarge RDS $2,016 /mo 1.87x
18. Same machine. Two prices. MONTHLY, ON-DEMAND $4,143 /mo vs. $19,490 /mo 4.70x 3x m8gd.8xlarge 1.9TB NVMe, 260/530K IOPS Self-hosted on EC2 3x db.m8gd.8xlarge · Multi-AZ 1TB io2 40K IOPS RDS
19. Sovereignty. Of all the trade-offs, the one whose shelf life is expiring fastest . Foreign jurisdictions, CLOUD-Act reach, data residency law.
20. My Server. My Rules. The MSMR Manifesto • Postgres source code • OS-level access • Install any tool • Install any extension • Unfettered superuser • Replication stream • Backups - access rights • The right to leave
21. Can we bring cloud convenience back to self-hosting? Short answer: yes. And it's already happening.
22. Open source has caught up. ≤ 2015 - PgBouncer - Patroni - PgBackRest 2018 First K8s ops: - Crunchy - Zalando 2019-20 Ansible ops: - Autobase - Pigsty 2021–22 Modern K8s ops: - CNPG - StackGres 2026 ????
23. Databases on Kubernetes aren’t for everyone. Perceived complexity. Huge skill gap. So: caught up for the K8s crowd. For everyone else, not yet. Almost.
24. Your Own Postgres Cloud – it’s coming! Fully Open. Fully sovereign. Run anywhere. You own it. Any extension. On bare Linux. Fully automated. Install-to-cluster: in a few seconds.
25. Make Postgres Yours again. Álvaro Hernández @ahachete