Developer Platform Briefing — September 15, 2025

Executive briefing: The PostgreSQL Global Development Group provides five years of fixes for each major release. PostgreSQL 13, launched in September 2020, exits community support on November 13, 2025. Organisations still running 13.x lose access to coordinated security patches and cumulative bug fixes, increasing exposure to privilege escalation flaws like CVE-2024-4317. Engineering teams should schedule upgrades to PostgreSQL 15 or 16, rehearse replication cutovers, and validate extension compatibility before the support window closes.

Key engineering checkpoints

Version inventory. Map clusters, replicas, and embedded workloads running PostgreSQL 13, including container images, managed services, and packaged applications.
Extension readiness. Confirm that PostGIS, pg_partman, logical replication plugins, and custom extensions support the target upgrade version.
Performance baselines. Capture query plans and index statistics before upgrading so regressions can be detected quickly.

Operational priorities

Upgrade rehearsal. Use pg_upgrade or logical replication blue/green patterns to migrate with minimal downtime, testing rollback plans in staging.
Managed service coordination. Align with cloud providers’ maintenance calendars—Amazon RDS, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, and Cloud SQL typically enforce upgrades within months of upstream EOL.
Security hardening. Apply remaining 13.x patches immediately and monitor for vendor-specific backported fixes until decommissioning.

Enablement moves

Update platform roadmaps to prioritise schema refactors that simplify adoption of PostgreSQL 16 features such as logical decoding on standbys.
Brief product owners on required regression testing so release schedules account for database upgrade sprints.

Sources

Zeph Tech leads PostgreSQL upgrade programs, automating inventory, testing, and rollout plans so platforms remain fully supported.