Understanding Operators

In traditional information technology (IT) organizations, specialized and dedicated teams were required to maintain applications and other software components such as databases, caches, and messaging components. Those teams were continuously observing the software ecosystem and doing specific things such as taking backups for databases, upgrading and patching newer versions of software components, and more.

Operators are like system administrators or engineers, continuously monitoring applications running on the Kubernetes environment and performing operational tasks associated with the specific component. In other words, an Operator is an automated software manager that manages the installation and life cycle of applications on Kubernetes.

Put simply, instead of you creating and updating Kubernetes Objects (Deployment, Ingress, and so on), the Operator takes this responsibility based on the configuration you provide. The configuration that directs the...