CloudNativeCon + KubeCon Europe 2017

The Kubernetes container orchestrator scales and connects stateless applications quite easily. Stateful applications can require more work. Databases, caching systems, and file stores are harder to dynamically manage with data intact, and sometimes come with their own notion of clustering. Operators automate these tasks. Operators are Kubernetes agents that know how to deploy, scale, manage, and even upgrade complex applications.

In this talk, we'll illustrate the Operator concept, showing how Operators are built atop the Kubernetes third-party resources mechanism, with a close examination of the open source etcd Operator. We'll demonstrate Operators in action, including the extension of the Operator concept to upgrading Kubernetes control plane components themselves. The audience will learn how to deploy Operators, and how to begin developing Operators to manage their own stateful applications.