Linux distribution maker CoreOS has launched Operators as a new open source container management concept. The new software is designed to extend Kubernetes and simplify container management. The operating system is known for its capabilities of maintaining open source projects for Linux containers.
Operators is not a standalone software by CoreOS. Instead, it depends upon Google’s Kubernetes. The development works as a microservice to help developers in breaking down complex application structure into discrete pieces. This improves the efficiency of complex applications and enables efficient 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,” explains Brandon Philips, CTO of CoreOS, in a blog post.
In typical cases, the programmer has to reduce the complex tasks on a whiteboard to view the project. Manually locate IP addresses of server and configure them on three different machines. Operators can automate this process and save developer’s 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 application state and recover the previous state from the existing backups.
The CoreOS team has developed two open source Operators, namely the etcd Operator and Prometheus Operator. While the former one 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 Operator and Prometheus Operator from their GitHub repositories. Moreoover, CoreOS is presuming the Kubernetes community support to be the key contributor for the new launch.
