Keep the Space Shuttle Flying: Writing Robust Operators

As the operator pattern becomes the de-facto pattern for extending Kubernetes, the community is increasingly adding new declarative APIs for external resources that are managed by traditional imperati …

As the operator pattern becomes the de-facto pattern for extending Kubernetes, the community is increasingly adding new declarative APIs for external resources that are managed by traditional imperative API.In this talk, we will explore a set of lessons learned from building Operators that bridge Kubernetes’ declarative API with external imperative API. We’ll cover some of the challenges around resource identity, long-running changes, retries, progress, handling failures, validation, dry-runs, deletions, and finalizers. These lessons are based on the real-world experience of building multiple complex operators within the Rook (https://rook.io), Crossplane (https://crossplane.io).