Building a container image

Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform, meaning that it is designed to run applications that have been built into containers. Even the core system components for Kubernetes, such as the API server and scheduler, run as containers. So, it should come as no surprise that the Operators developed for Kubernetes must also be built and deployed as containers.

For this process, a basic understanding of the fundamentals of working with containers is helpful. Fortunately, however, the Operator SDK abstracts away much of the configuration and command-line incantations to simple Makefile targets. These are build macros that help to automate the process of compiling binaries and container images (as well as pushing those images to a registry and deploying them in a cluster).

To see the full list of available targets provided by the Operator SDK, run the make help command within the project:

$ make help
Usage:
  make <target>
General...