Operators from CoreOS to Well Organize Kubernetes Container Management

Kubernetes will now get more advanced with CoreOS introducing Operators, which is a new container management concept. It was also said that the technology is going to be open-sourced. Containers can be defined as small, micro services which helps the developers to manage complex applications by breaking them down into smaller, discrete pieces, thereby helping them run complex applications in a much easier way.

Brandon Philips, CoreOS CTO stated “We are introducing the concept of an ‘Operator.’ It’s a concept for taking a lot of the knowledge an engineer [or developer] has inside of a script or run book — domain-specific knowledge — and writing software that can do a lot of that automatically.”

Also read: Kubernetes 1.4 - Future Of DevOps Tools

Operators are going to help reduce much work for the developers. It will be able to reduce many complex tasks into a whiteboard view of the project. The cluster will be consisting of 3 servers and it will involve a tedious process of locating the IP address of each of those servers. The developers then need to create and copy the configuration files for all of those 3 servers.

This process is said to take a lot of time for the developers and even worse, it requires some manual adjusting every time the plan changes. The Operators will reduce most of this work for the developers by allowing them to just use a simple declarative statement “Launch three clusters”. The Operator will perform the rest of the operations, reducing significant work.

Kubernetes is still considered to be good at scaling simpler, stateless applications. The Operators are considered important when launching applications like monitoring tools or databases. Heavy scripting is required to make these applications work and Operators are considered to remove that layer of complexity.