CoreOS launches Operators to extend Kubernetes with new capabilities

Linux distribution maker, CoreOS, has launched Operators as a new open source container management concept. This is designed to extend Kubernetes and simplify container management. The operating system is known for its capability to maintain open source projects for Linux containers.

Operators is not standalone software from CoreOS. Instead, it depends upon Google’s Kubernetes. The development works as a micro service to help developers in breaking down a complex application structure into discrete pieces. This improves the efficiency of complex applications and enables improved application build delivery.

“An Operator builds upon the basic Kubernetes resource and controller concepts, and adds a set of knowledge or configuration that allows the Operator to execute common application tasks,” explained Brandon Philips, CTO of CoreOS, in a blog post.

In typical cases, the programmer has to first reduce the complex tasks on a whiteboard to view the project, and then manually locate IP addresses of the server and configure them on three different machines. Operators can automate this process and save the developers’ time. The concept can reduce the effort involved in all the manual work with one declarative statement.

Operators can even eliminate the layer of complexity of heavy scripting in complex applications. It also makes it easy to enable periodical backups of the application’s state and recover the previous state from the existing backups.

The CoreOS team has developed two open source Operators -- the etcd Operator and Prometheus Operator. While the former enables developers to create, manage and distribute etcd clusters, the latter provides a solution to use with the Prometheus tool to monitor Kubernetes resources.

Developers can access the code of the etcd and Prometheus Operators from their GitHub repositories. CoreOS is banking on the Kubernetes community’s support for the new launch.