This week’s featured open-source project is a toolkit designed to manage Kubernetes native applications in an automated and scalable way. The Operator Framework was first introduced in 2018 by CoreOS who saw a high barrier to entry for building Kubernetes applications.
More recently, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation announced the Operator Framework was joining as an incubation-level project. “We are so excited that the Operator Framework has been accepted into CNCF at incubation level,” Erin Boyd, Operator Framework maintainer and principal software engineer at Red Hat, said at the time. “Operators make life easier for Kubernetes developers, and we are so excited to work with the CNCF to make this process even more seamless.”
The Operator Framework provides a software development kit for Kubernetes applications, high level APIs, management framework for extending Kubernetes with Operators, and a catalog of existing Operators and guidance on how to contribute new Operators. There are also three pillers for the framework: the SDK for building, testing and packaging Operators; the life cycle manager for managing operators on a Kubernetes cluster; and OperatorHub.io, which is a place for developers and admins to find curated Operator-backed services.
“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,” according to the project’s website.
