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New Kubernetes OperatorHub for Red Hat OpenShift to enable hybrid cloud flexibility for enterprises

May 8, 2019Reza Shafii

Tags:Topics

Today, Red Hat announces Red Hat OpenShift 4, the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform. With this, we celebrate a new capability to further enable the flexibility of hybrid cloud on any infrastructure: OperatorHub embedded for Red Hat OpenShift. We are also introducing Red Hat OpenShift Operator Certification to deliver to customers a trusted ecosystem of enterprise applications with consistent packaging, deployment and lifecycle management across all OpenShift footprints.

Today’s achievement builds on the work we’ve done around Operators, starting with the introduction of the Operator concept in 2016. In 2018, we announced the Operator Framework to help others build and automate the lifecycle of Operators. Earlier this year we announced the OperatorHub.io community of curated Kubernetes Operators to make it easier to find and share Operators.

With OperatorHub embedded on OpenShift 4, developers and administrators are empowered to automate and orchestrate complex tasks required to maintain an application across any cloud where Kubernetes runs. Kubernetes Operators implement cloud-like automation capabilities, such as self-service provisioning, self-tuning, data-replication, automated backups, and automated updates, for their respective services. Red Hat OpenShift has more than 40 Operators available in its embedded OperatorHub catalog, including both community and OpenShift Certified Operators. With Red Hat certified Operators, businesses can provide their developers with a toolbox of workloads “as-a-service,” verified on OpenShift and backed by Red Hat and its partners.

Operators on OpenShift

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is the first enterprise Kubernetes offering that delivers a catalog of Operators and includes both Certified and community Operators. Users discover and deploy Kubernetes-native services from the community ecosystem, ISV partners, and Red Hat.

  • Red Hat OpenShift Certified Operators: Red Hat OpenShift Operator Certification is an offering under Red Hat Partner Connect, our technology partner program, by which partners can certify their Operators for use on Red Hat OpenShift. With OpenShift Certified Operators, customers can benefit from validated, well-integrated, mature and supported Operators from Red Hat or partner ISVs in their hybrid cloud environments.

  • Community Operators: With access to community Operators, customers can try out Operators at a variety of maturity levels. Delivering the OperatorHub community Operators on OpenShift fosters iterative software development and deployment as developers get self-service access to popular components like databases, message queues or tracing in a managed-service fashion on the platform.

Users can visually recognize the Operator level within their OpenShift environments.

 

This group of Operators shows progress made towards the more than 60 partners that committed to supporting Operators over the past year and we expect to bring more Operators over time.

Sample Operators available on OpenShift 4 include:

  • Data and document stores:

    • Couchbase: The Couchbase Autonomous Operator allows users to more easily deploy, manage, and maintain Couchbase deployments.

    • etcd: This Operator creates and maintains highly-available etcd clusters on Kubernetes providing a more reliable way to store data in a distributed key value store across a cluster of machines.

    • Hazelcast: The Hazelcast Operator is an in-memory data grid offering caching solutions to help verify that data is in place when it’s needed for optimal performance.

    • MongoDB: The MongoDB Enterprise Kubernetes Operator enables easier deploys of MongoDB into Kubernetes clusters, using MongoDB management, monitoring and backup platforms, Ops Manager and Cloud Manager.

    • Redis: The Redis Enterprise Operator manages the enterprise-grade, distributed, in-memory NoSQL database server, fully compatible with open source Redis by Redis Labs.

  • Virtualization:

    • KubeVirt: This Operator enables the migration of existing virtualized workloads directly into the development workflows supported by Kubernetes.

  • Relational databases:

    • Percona: The Percona Operator automatically creates/changes/deletes needed Kubernetes objects with appropriate settings to provide Percona MySQL PXC instances on Kubernetes.

    • PlanetScale: This Operator deploys and manages instances of MySQL with Vitess, a database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL through generalized sharding.

    • PostgreSQL Operator: The PostgreSQL Operator by Crunchy Data runs within a Kubernetes cluster and provides a means to deploy and manage PostgreSQL clusters.

  • Monitoring and insights:

    • Prometheus: This Operator provides easier monitoring definitions for Kubernetes services and deployment and management of Prometheus instances.

    • ProphetStor Federator.AI: The FederatorAI Operator provides easier configuration and operation of AI-enabled Kubernetes resource orchestrator.

    • Sysdig: This Operator installs the Sysdig Agent for Sysdig Monitor and Sysdig Secure to all nodes in your cluster.

  • Data streaming:

    • Red Hat AMQ Streams: This Operator by Red Hat provides management for AMQ Streams, a high-performance data streaming platform based on the Apache Kafka project.

  • Storage:

    • Rook: This Operator installs Rook to create, configure, and manage Rook clusters which provide the platform, framework, and support for a diverse set of storage solutions.

    • StorageOS: The StorageOS Operator installs and manages StorageOS within a cluster.

There are 22 Red Hat OpenShift Certified Operators today that include Anchore Engine Operator, AppDynamics Cluster Agent, Aqua Certified Operator, Black Duck Operator for OpenShift, Couchbase Operator, Dynatrace OneAgent Operator, Federator.ai Operator by ProphetStor, Hazelcast Operator, InsightEdge Operator by Gigaspaces, Instana Agent Operator, MariaDB Platform Operator, MemSQL Operator, MongoDB Operator, NewRelic Operator, NuoDB Operator, OpenUnison Operator by Tremolo Security, PlanetScale, Operator for Vitess, ROBIN Storage Operator, StorageOS Operator, Sysdig Agent Operator, TiDB Operator by PingCap and Tufin Orca Operator.

“We created the MongoDB Enterprise Kubernetes Operator to enable easier deploys of MongoDB into Kubernetes clusters. As Kubernetes continues to drive innovation for our customers across all industries, we are pleased to offer the MongoDB Enterprise Kubernetes Operator with Red Hat OpenShift Operator Certification to bring our combined customers even more ease and consistency across platforms,” said Alan Chhabra, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Partners, MongoDB

“In an ecosystem based on Kubernetes, it was a no brainer for us to create the Sysdig Agent Operator and Falco Operator to provide customers with an easier way to get started with Sysdig’s combined visibility, security and forensics solution. Even more, with Red Hat OpenShift Operator Certification, our customers can benefit from validated Operators that enable a consistent experience across their teams, and across hybrid environments,” said Loris Degioanni, CTO and founder of Sysdig.

What makes an Operator certified on OpenShift

As explained in the OperatorHub.io introduction, community Operators on OperatorHub.io have been curated based on some basic criteria. They have passed some testing on their cluster lifecycle features and are packaged with the Operator Framework’s Operator Lifecycle Manager, and have acceptable documentation for its intended users. They can work on any Kubernetes.

OpenShift Certified Operators have been additionally validated beyond the basic tests performed for the community Operators from OperatorHub.io. With Red Hat OpenShift Certified Operators, partners can now look to Red Hat to manage updates for OpenShift releases. Partners also work with Red Hat for security vulnerability response and automated rebuilding of container images and can offer their products with joint, commercial support on OpenShift. A Certified Operator on OpenShift offers additional enterprise compatibility that includes:

  • Built with Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Red Hat Universal Base Image

  • Automated security maintenance for container images per Red Hat Container Certification

  • Published in OperatorHub on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

  • Automated updates deployed on OpenShift

  • Commercial support by Red Hat and ISV partner

What’s Next for Kubernetes Operators

With Operators available on OpenShift, users have more ease in finding and using validated Operators to manage their Kubernetes deployments at scale. Moving forward, we want to continue lowering the bar for Kubernetes adoption, and Operators are one way of enabling that. We look forward to expanding the ecosystem of community Operators to make Kubernetes the automation engine across the hybrid cloud.

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Reza Shafii

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