Summary

In this chapter, we introduced the fundamental concepts of the Operator Framework. These include the Operator SDK, OLM, and OperatorHub. In addition to the development and distribution pillars of the Operator Framework, the Capability Model provides an additional tool for measuring the functionality of an Operator. Throughout this book, we will be exploring these components in deeper detail to get a hands-on understanding of how they actually work.

We began this chapter by examining some of the problems that arise when manually managing applications and clusters without Operators. This was done through the lens of a simple generic web application based on a couple of Pods and a Persistent Volume. The main difficulties in managing something such as this include the time and resources required to debug applications. This is especially important in cloud applications, where high availability (HA) and consistent uptime are top priorities.

We then looked at how each pillar of the Operator Framework addresses the biggest difficulties of application management. These pillars begin with the Operator SDK, which streamlines Operator development. This allows developers to begin iterating on automated reconciliation logic to get their Operators written quickly. It also provides commands to interact with OLM, which is the next pillar of the framework.

OLM exists to help administrators install and curate Operators within a cluster. It provides dependency management and notifies administrators of conflicting APIs to promote cluster stability. It also serves as a local catalog of installed Operators, which is useful for users on the cluster.

Next, we examined OperatorHub and its role in the broader open source Kubernetes community. As an open index of freely available Operators, OperatorHub serves to promote the adoption and maintenance of Operators. It consumes the same manifests as OLM to provide a standardized set of metadata about each Operator to users.

Finally, the Capability Model summarizes the maturity of an Operator based on the functionality it provides. This is helpful to users, but it also serves as a convenient roadmap for developers to plan features for their Operators.

To summarize each of these components, we revisited the original application example presented in the first section. We showed that, with an Operator in place to manage the application, cluster administrators do not need to be keenly aware of the architectural details of the app to keep it running. Instead, this information and controls are abstracted away behind the Operator's interface.

With all of this in mind, we move on to the next chapters to explore each of these topics in depth. We will also be following detailed examples to build our own sample Operator. In the next chapter, we'll begin looking at the important concepts of designing an Operator based on its interactions with a Kubernetes cluster.