Deletion Policy¶

The Aiven Operator provides a deletion policy annotation that prevents deletion of Aiven resources when Kubernetes resources are removed. This feature works with all Aiven operator resources.

Overview¶

By default, when you delete an Aiven operator resource (like PostgreSQL, KafkaTopic, ServiceUser, etc.), the operator deletes both the Kubernetes resource and the corresponding Aiven service. The controllers.aiven.io/deletion-policy: Orphan annotation allows you to override this behavior and preserve the Aiven resource while removing only the Kubernetes resource.

Using the Deletion Policy¶

Step 1: Add the Annotation¶

Add the deletion policy annotation to the resource you want to protect:

apiVersion: aiven.io/v1alpha1
kind: PostgreSQL  # or any other Aiven resource
metadata:
  name: my-database
  namespace: my-namespace
  annotations:
    controllers.aiven.io/deletion-policy: Orphan
spec:
  # ... existing configuration

Step 2: Delete the Kubernetes Resource¶

Now you can safely delete the Kubernetes resource:

kubectl delete postgresql my-database -n my-namespace

The Kubernetes resource is deleted, but the Aiven service remains intact and continues running.