Ardent Performance Computing

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Agents Gone Awry on Postgres SBOMs: Start Over

If you were wondering, it’s the SBOM thing that I mentioned the other day.

Postgres Extensions in containers with full inventory, provenance and attestation. I’ve been using plenty of AI Agents to put this together. This blog is a little scattered (apologies) but as they say, I didn’t have time to write a short letter.

Here’s what I believe to be the exact structure of current CloudNativePG images:

I have a bunch of irons in the fire related to this project:

• A downstream fork of CloudNativePG/postgres-extensions-containers which can host a bunch of Open Source code which isn’t allowed by CNCF.
  • I track upstream build infra, design my changes to minimize merge conflicts
• A set of patches fixing issues I’ve found, which I’ve submitted upstream
  • Patches are applied on my fork so that I can get stuff working
  • Upstream often tweaks stuff, so then I need to deal with the merge
• This huge new feature – adding proper SBOMs – which is in a feature branch off my repo
  • Planning to submit this upstream
  • Stacked on top of my other fix PRs
• Another huge new feature – PGRX build support – which is stacked on this SBOM feature
  • Not submitted upstream, will only live in my fork
  • Still want to structure code to minimize merge conflicts from upstream

After working on this for like a week, I realized that the set of commands to validate the security and provenance info was going to be totally different for PGRX than for upstream.

I think this is too confusing to users. There needs to be one simple, consistent command to verify provenance and SBOM material. I didn’t have that at the beginning and the AI Agent enabled racing ahead with the code. I didn’t realize the issue until now.

One thing I had been focused on was not having a bunch of things to copy, if someone needs to mirror images to a private container registry. With that focus, this is what I had inadvertantly ended up with.

For Debian-based extensions:

On the PGRX side, builds were timing out because they ran under qemu emulation. (Which is fine if you’re just installing debian packages.) I refactored the PGRX build to use native GitHub Runners, so that it would use this new design: