Operator Framework: Building Apps on Kubernetes

I&#x27;ve been an early adopter of docker. Used Compose when it was still called Fig, used and deployed kubernetes beta up to version 1 for in-house PAAS&#x2F;heroku like environment.<p>Must say I do miss those days when K8s was an idea that could fit in your head. The primitives were just enough back then. It was powerful developer tool for teams and we used it aggressively to accelerate our development process.<p>K8s has now moved beyond this and seems to me to be focussing strongly on its operational patterns. You can see these operational patterns being used together to create a fairly advanced on-prem cloud infrastructure. At times, to me, it looks like over-engineering.<p>Looking at the borg papers, I don&#x27;t remember seeing operational primitives this advanced. The develop interface was fairly simple i.e this is my app, give me these resources, go!<p>I know you don&#x27;t have to use this new construct but it sure does make the landscape a lot more complicated.

Can anyone talk about the positives&#x2F;negatives of Operators v&#x2F;s Helm Charts?<p>From what I see, it seems like Operators are a better tool for defining and deploying Custom k8s resources whereas helm charts are good way to organize applications (deployment, service etc. templates packaged into one tar).

<i></i>tl;dr<i></i> - this is a rant. the operator pattern should stay a pattern. &quot;framework&quot; and &quot;application&quot; are meaningless these days. Stop trying to make things so easy a &quot;monkey could do it&quot;.<p>No no no no no. The words &quot;framework&quot; and &quot;application&quot; are so meaningless now that even reading this post is draining.<p>CoreOS pioneered the Operator <i>pattern</i>, but I think building up that pattern into a framework to get people developing it away from the knowing the basics of k8s is such a mistake. The operator pattern falls out of the primitives that k8s offers (there&#x27;s <i>literally</i> a concept called a controller) -- this makes it seem like another app platform. I think the level of abstraction isn&#x27;t even right, this is like trying to enable people to write daemons without knowing anything about linux or signals or processes.<p>Then again, I also dislike tools like Helm because they do the same thing. Why is everyone so in a rush to make inevitably leaky abstractions to make everything so easy a monkey could do it? All you&#x27;re doing is encouraging cookie cutter programmers to write cookie cutter poorly understood code that will break on someone inevitably.<p>All essential complexity introduced by features in the layer below an abstraction cannot be simplified, it can only be hidden or removed. It is OK for things to be hard, as long as they are simple (in the rich hickey easy vs simple analogy).

Can we use Operator Framework for building operators that also require new api server using api aggregator?

&gt; <i>You may be familiar with Operators from the concept’s introduction in 2016. An Operator is a method of packaging, deploying and managing a Kubernetes application.</i><p>&quot;Operators&quot;, as introduced in 2016, were just bespoke Go programs that communicated with Kubernetes internals in a pretty low-level way.<p>You were writing special-case plugins for Kubernetes, but they didn&#x27;t want to make it <i>sound</i> that way, because I guess that just doesn&#x27;t sound hip or devopsy. This branding exercise worked out for CoreOS -- Red Hat just bought them.<p>This whole space is massively infused with bullshit. It&#x27;s because all of these companies want to make money selling you cloud stuff, because it&#x27;s profitable to rent computers at 3-5x the TCO. Google especially is hungry to claw back the lead in the cloud space from Amazon, and it&#x27;s not hard to conceive why Kubernetes doesn&#x27;t seem to work without fuss anywhere except GKE, or to understand the massive marketing dollars that Google is pumping into this whole Kubernetes farce (and for the record, Google seems to consider HN an important platform for k8s PR; I&#x27;ve been censured after too many Googlers found my k8s-skeptical posts &quot;tedious&quot;).<p>Anyway, I guess that&#x27;s neither here nor there. Just annoyed at what is by now the totally conventional status quo of overhyped empty promises made by people who seem more like ignorant promoters and fanboys than serious engineers.<p>This &quot;Operator Framework&quot; seems to be the same concept of Operators, just with additional library support for the plugins -- err, &quot;Operators&quot;. It may be a good improvement, will have to research more.