Over the last several years, the adoption of Kubernetes has increased tremendously. In fact, according to a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) survey, 78% of respondents in late 2019 were using Kubernetes in production. Leveraging Kubernetes allows organizations to create a management layer to commodify clouds themselves and build cross- or hybrid-cloud deployments that hide the provider-specific implementation details from the rest of the team.
One crucial part of the Kubernetes ecosphere is Operators — a tool initially introduced by CoreOS in 2016 to utilize the Kubernetes APIs themselves to deploy and manage the state of applications. Operators are a critical part of the deployment and operation of applications in a cross/hybrid environment. They can help manage and maintain state across a federated Kubernetes deployment (multiple Kubernetes clusters running together) or even across clusters.