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. A Kubernetes application is an application that is both deployed on Kubernetes and managed using the Kubernetes APIs and kubectl tooling. To be able to make the most of Kubernetes, you need a set of cohesive APIs to extend in order to service and manage your applications that run on Kubernetes. You can think of Operators as the runtime that manages this type of application on Kubernetes.

Conceptually, an Operator takes human operational knowledge and encodes it into software that is more easily packaged and shared with consumers. Think of an Operator as an extension of the software vendor’s engineering team that watches over your Kubernetes environment and uses its current state to make decisions in milliseconds. Operators follow a maturity model that ranges from basic functionality to having specific logic for an application. Advanced Operators are designed to handle upgrades seamlessly, react to failures automatically, and not take shortcuts, like skipping a software backup process to save time.

The pieces that are now being launched as the Operator Framework are the culmination of the years of work and experience of our team in building Operators. We’ve seen that Operators’ capabilities differ in sophistication depending on how much intelligence has been added into the implementation logic of the Operator itself. We’ve also learned that the creation of an Operator typically starts by automating an application’s installation and self-service provisioning capabilities, and then evolves to take on more complex automation.

We believe that the new Operator Framework represents the next big step for Kubernetes by using a baseline of leading practices to help lower the application development barrier on Kubernetes. The project delivers a software development kit (SDK) and the ability to manage app installs and updates by using the lifecycle management mechanism, while enabling administrators to exercise Operator capabilities on any Kubernetes cluster.