Chi
Chi has spent the last decade developing software for startups focused on data platforms. She played a pivotal role in developing FerretDB, an open-source alternative to MongoDB built atop PostgreSQL. She currently works on the OpenEverest project, where she focuses on automating database provisioning and management on Kubernetes. She is an active contributor to the open-source community, collaborating with peers on GitHub under the handle @chilagrow.
Interventions
Running databases on Kubernetes is challenging. Choosing Kubernetes to run your workloads has a lot of advantages: it gives you flexibility, and there are plenty of different solutions on the market that can be a part of your perfect technology stack. The real challenge is to build a solid, reliable foundation that will be possible to maintain without causing a headache for your platform team. With databases, it’s even more important to use proven in battle technology, as no one wants to see their data unavailable and their application down.
To reduce complexity for database workloads, operators were invented. You can handle the day two operations much more easily than setting up everything by yourself; still, there are different solutions available. To address this challenge, another idea has been born: OpenEverest is a fully open source solution recently donated to CNCF. By running literally three commands, you can set up a tool that allows you to manage different databases and database-related technologies from a unified GUI. You don’t have to worry additionally about backups, monitoring, etc., everything can be controlled from there.
During the presentation, you’ll learn how to use OpenEverest, how to reduce your daily operations, setup your own DBaaS platform, everything available as a 100% open source solution. Additionally, you can learn from case studies how different companies solve their problems with OpenEverest.
OpenEverest is an open-source, cloud-native platform designed to simplify running, managing, and scaling diverse data workloads on Kubernetes. It evolved from a single-vendor initiative to a CNCF Sandbox project in March 2026 by moving beyond its initial vendor-specific platform. While initial support was limited to PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MongoDB due to its single-vendor roots, the project is now making it easy to extend the original system with a modular plugin architecture to enable seamless multi-vendor integration.
This transition from a vendor-specific ecosystem to an extensible provider-based design serves as the primary enabler for the community to extend the capability of OpenEverest seamlessly, allowing for the integration of any technology regardless of the founding vendor's roadmap. This session examines the technical refactoring into a plugin-based system and the milestones required to achieve true vendor neutrality and CNCF Sandbox status. Participants will gain a practical blueprint for transforming single-vendor projects into inclusive, community-driven cloud-native platforms.
Running production-grade databases on Kubernetes is becoming increasingly common, but managing their lifecycle remains fragmented and complex for SRE and DevOps teams. Critical operations such as scaling, monitoring, backup, and restore currently require navigating distinct, database-specific APIs and tools. This complexity prevents teams from fully realizing the operational efficiency and uniformity that Kubernetes provides.
This talk introduces OpenEverest, a CNCF Sandbox project designed to address this operational gap. OpenEverest provides a single, unified UI and CLI to manage SRE functions for popular open-source databases such as PostgreSQL and MySQL deployed on Kubernetes. It abstracts away database-specific differences, offering standardized control for diverse databases.
Join us to learn how OpenEverest simplifies the path to production readiness, reduces operational toil, and is building a pioneering open-source database management layer.