Managing stateful, mission-critical databases on Kubernetes demands automation, reliability and a predictable lifecycle. We’re excited to announce the general availability of the MariaDB Enterprise Kubernetes Operator 25.10, a landmark release designed to bring unprecedented stability and automated high availability to your cloud-native environments.
This release introduces our first Long-Term Support (LTS) version of the operator, providing you with a hardened, stable baseline and a predictable upgrade path for your most critical applications. We’re also rolling out built-in support for automated primary/replica topologies with MariaDB MaxScale, dramatically simplifying high availability, disaster recovery and read scaling.
And, of course, the operator supports the latest GA versions of MariaDB Enterprise Server 11.8 and MaxScale 25.10, allowing you to leverage powerful new security, performance and monitoring features – all managed seamlessly by the operator.
Let’s explore the new capabilities that will help you reduce operational overhead and meet your SLAs in production.
Long-Term Support (LTS) Release
With the 25.10 release, we’re introducing annual LTS releases for the Enterprise Kubernetes Operator to provide long-term stability and a predictable upgrade path. LTS releases focus on security updates and critical bug fixes and maintain CRD compatibility within the LTS release, helping teams meet SLAs and reduce operational overhead in mission-critical environments. New features will continue to ship in the rolling releases between LTS cycles, while the LTS serves as a hardened, stable baseline.
Primary/Replica Topology with Replication
The Enterprise Kubernetes Operator now enables provisioning of MariaDB primary/replica topology with MaxScale for automated failover/switchover with topology – and health-aware routing. Replicas scale on demand and can be seeded from physical backups or VolumeSnapshots, reducing day-2 toil while improving availability and read throughput. When replication errors occur, the Enterprise Kubernetes Operator automatically re-seeds the replica from the latest physical backup or VolumeSnapshot and rejoins it to the topology, cutting MTTR.
MariaDB Enterprise Server
The Enterprise Kubernetes Operator now supports MariaDB Enterprise Server 11.8, which delivers security improvements, compatibility enhancements, new data types and SQL functions, performance and disk-space management, and auditing/monitoring enhancements – giving teams a stronger, more efficient engine for production with the Enterprise Kubernetes Operator.
MariaDB MaxScale
The Enterprise Kubernetes Operator also supports MariaDB MaxScale 25.10, the most current release that includes new capabilities such as a database firewall (learns safe query patterns and blocks unsafe ones), MaxGUI SSO via OpenID Connect, and NoSQL compatibility improvements.
VolumeSnapshot Lock Optimization
The Enterprise Kubernetes Operator now optimizes the locking mechanism during volume snapshot creation. With this enhancement, the lock is released immediately after the VolumeSnapshot is provisioned, eliminating potential contention during the long replication process of a snapshot by backend storage.
Support for Galera Sequence + GTID in Recovery
The Enterprise Kubernetes Operator now supports recovery of Galera clusters in mixed-topology deployments where a Galera cluster also exposes GTIDs for downstream replicas. Now the recovery process proceeds without error when the recovered position includes both the Galera sequence and a GTID.
The MariaDB Enterprise Kubernetes Operator 25.10 release delivers a powerful combination of production-grade stability and intelligent automation. With the new LTS option for predictable lifecycles, simplified primary/replica high availability, and support for the latest Enterprise Server and MaxScale, you can confidently run your most demanding stateful workloads on Kubernetes with less effort and greater resilience.
Ready to simplify your cloud-native database operations? Get started with an Enterprise Platform Plus subscription to use Enterprise Kubernetes Operator today.
