CoreOS announced “Operators” – a new capability for making applications easier to run and update on Kubernetes.
An Operator is application-specific software that extends the Kubernetes API to create, configure, and manage instances of complex stateful applications on behalf of a Kubernetes user. Like the built-in Kubernetes API resources, it doesn’t manage just a single instance of the application, but multiple instances across the entire cluster.
“An Operator makes managing complex software on top of Kubernetes easy,” said Brandon Philips, CTO of CoreOS. “It is for all of those apps that aren’t simple to horizontally scale. The big idea is that by installing an operator into your cluster you will get powerful new capabilities like being able to on-demand deploy new distributed databases or monitoring services declaratively with simple commands. This is another step forward in making distributed systems easy to install, run and update.“
