Pause/resume and standby mode for a PostgreSQL cluster

Pause and resume

Sometimes you may need to temporarily shut down (pause) your cluster and restart it later, such as during maintenance.

The deploy/cr.yaml file contains a special spec.pause key for this. Setting it to true gracefully stops the cluster:

spec:
  .......
  pause: true

To start the cluster after it was paused, revert the spec.pause key to false.

Troubleshooting tip

If you’re pausing the cluster when there is a running backup, the Operator won’t pause it for you. It will print a warning about running backups. In this case delete a running backup job and retry.

Put in standby mode

You can also put the cluster into a standby (read-only) mode instead of completely shutting it down. This is done by a special spec.standby key. Set it to true for read-only state. To resume the normal cluster operation, set it to false.

spec:
  .......
  standby: false

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Last update: November 18, 2025
Created: July 12, 2022