VSHN.timer #39: Smooth Operators

Welcome to another VSHN.timer! Every Monday, 5 links related to Kubernetes, OpenShift, CI / CD, and DevOps; all stuff coming out of our own chat system, making us think, laugh, or simply work better.
This week we’re going to talk about Kubernetes operators… and that famous song, which some of you will have stuck in their heads for days to come thanks to the title of this post.
1. Two weeks ago we mentioned that Kubernetes is raising the abstraction level for DevOps. For the past three years since their introduction, operators have been leading the way in this upwards movement. As a reminder, Operators are custom controllers extending Kubernetes to create, configure, and manage instances of complex apps. At the time of this writing, OperatorHub.io lists over a hundred operators, providing Day-2 management support to DevOps engineers all over the world. In the meantime, engineers learnt and identified common issues and best practices for operators. What makes, then, a good Operator these days? Alex Handy from Red Hat recently summarized it in a detailed blog post.
https://www.openshift.com/blog/what-makes-a-good-operator

I’m sure this will upset somebody, but OLM and Operator Hub should go away. It’s creating unnecessary fragmentation in the space. Operator is a polluted term, but it’s here to stay. The unit of management is not an operator, it’s a helm chart. The ecosystem has spoken.

— Darren Shepherd (@ibuildthecloud) April 18, 2020

2. Some companies are actively harnessing the power of Kubernetes operators. Here at VSHN we have published some, for example our legendary K8up backup operator, the Espejo operator, and more recently the upcoming Project Syn’s Lieutenant operator. Another well-known operator fan is the Banzai Cloud team, who recently introduced version 3 of their now ubiquitous Logging operator.
https://banzaicloud.com/blog/logging-operator-v3/
3. The Banzai Cloud team recently released the new Thanos Operator, whose main task thankfully isn’t to snap its fingers and delete half of your deployments. Quite the opposite, indeed; Thanos extends Prometheus with long term storage and querying capabilities, allowing DevOps engineers to be able to monitor multiple cloud environments in the easiest possible way.
https://banzaicloud.com/blog/thanos-operator/
4. Red Hat strongly supports the Kubernetes operator ecosystem. The Red Hat Communities of Practice regularly publish new, useful, and open-source operators showcasing novel uses. Take, for example, operators for Namespace Configuration, Quay, or Cert-Utils. Even better, check out the Operator Utility Library, itself written on top of the Operator SDK to help developers write better and smoother operators.
https://redhat-cop.github.io/
5. The tool of the week is the DBaaS Operator by amazee.io, whose name that says it all.
https://github.com/amazeeio/dbaas-operator
Do you use deploy operators in your clusters? Do they help you in your day-to-day work? Have you published any operator you would like to share with the community? Get in touch with us through the form at the bottom of this page, and see you next week for another edition of VSHN.timer.