Álvaro Hernández: Why Postgres Extensions should be packaged and distributed as OCI images

There is an ongoing and engaging open discussion in the Postgres Community around the future of Postgres extensions. At OnGres we have been operating for around three years a Postgres distribution and repository with around 200 extensions for StackGres, a fully-featured open source platform for self-hosting Postgres on Kubernetes. We would like to contribute to the discussion with all that we have learnt through this experience. We would also like to explain what we believe is the future of packaging and distribution of Postgres extensions. Extensions in StackGres Wide support for Postgres extensions was introduced in StackGres in our first GA release, 1.0.0, in 2021, with over 120 extensions supported at the time. This release included a new technology to dynamically load and unload extensions from the filesystem. It allows to create minimal Postgres images (avoiding the bloat and security risk of including dozens or hundreds of extensions in the image, most of which will remain unused) while allowing a fantastic user experience: to specify anytime, via YAML (or via StackGres Web Console), which extensions you want to have available in Postgres. spec: # [..] postgres: extensions: - name: postgis - name: timescaledb version: "2.13.0" The example shows the YAML snippet required to add Postgis (latest version) and Timescaledb (version pinned to 2.13.0) in StackGres (above); and how to browse, select and add extensions to StackGres via the Web Console (below). If you are interested in the internals of this technology, which is fully open source (as part of StackGres), I gave a talk at Kubecon North America 2021 about it (video, slides). As of today, StackGres supports close to 200 extensions, and more extensions are being added on a rolling basis. In parallel, we’re hard at work on a new infrastructure to build better, faster and more Postgres extensions (more about this in this post). StackGres’s extension repository is currently serving 1.5M e[...]