Today, there is often a high barrier to entry when it comes to building Kubernetes applications. There are a substantial number of pre-existing dependencies and assumptions, many of which may require experience and technical knowledge. At the same time, application consumers often do not want their services to be siloed across IT footprints with disparate management capabilities (for example, departments with differing tools for auditing, notification, metering, and so on).

The Operator Framework aims to address these points by helping to bring the expertise and knowledge of the Kubernetes community together in a single project that, when used as a standard application package, can make it easier to build applications for Kubernetes. By sharing this Framework with the community, we hope to enable an ecosystem of builders to more easily create their applications on Kubernetes via a common method and also provide a standardized set of tools to build consistent applications.

We believe a proper extension mechanism to Kubernetes shouldn’t be built without the community. To this end, Red Hat has proposed a “platform-dev” Special Interest Group that aligns well with the existing Kubebuilder project from Google and we look forward to working with other industry leaders should this group come to fruition.

“We are working together with Red Hat and the broader Kubernetes community to help enable this ecosystem with an easier way to create and operate their applications on Kubernetes,” said Phillip Wittrock, Software Engineer at Google, Kubernetes community member, and member of the Kubernetes steering committee. “By working together on platform development tools, we strive to make Kubernetes the foundation of choice for container-native apps - no matter where they reside.”