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What Is a Kubernetes Operator?

Kubernetes is popular due to its capability to deploy new apps at a faster pace. Thanks to "Infrastructure as data" (specifically, YAML), today you can express all your Kubernetes resources such as Pods, Deployments, Services, Volumes, etc., in a YAML file. These default objects make it much easier for DevOps and SRE engineers to fully express their workloads without the need to learn how to write code in a programming language like Python, Java, or Ruby.

Kubernetes is designed for automation. Out of the box, you get lots of built-in automation from the core of Kubernetes. It can speed up your development process by making easy, automated deployments, updates (rolling update), and by managing your apps and services with almost zero downtime. However, Kubernetes can’t automate the process natively for stateful applications. For example, say you have a stateful workload, such as a database application, running on several nodes. If a majority of nodes go down, you’ll need to reload the database from a specific snapshot following specific steps. Using existing default objects, types, and controllers in Kubernetes, this would be impossible to achieve.

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How KubeMQ Customers Build Scalable Messaging Platforms With Kubernetes Operators

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.

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How to Build a Kubernetes Operator

This is the second part of our series focusing on Kubernetes Operators, and it shows how you can build a Kubernetes Operator based on the Bitnami Apache Helm chart. Note that you can refer to the steps in this tutorial to build an operator for your own applications.

Prerequisites

  1. We assume you followed the first part of the series. Thus, you should have a Kubernetes cluster (v1.7 or newer) with a control plane and two workers running on your computer. Also, the Operator Lifecycle Manager should be installed on your system. You can enter the following command to verify that everything is set up:
Shell


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Kubernetes Operators: What Are They?

Kubernetes has become the gold standard for container orchestration. However, when it comes to running stateful applications, it needs to access a number of dependencies and operative tasks in order for it to function properly. As you can imagine, when doing this with thousands of containers, this is time-consuming and takes up a lot of developer resources, which is why you need Kubernetes Operators.

What Are Kubernetes Operators?

A Kubernetes Operator (usually just called Operator) refers to a method of packaging, deploying, and managing a Kubernetes application.