Red Hat launches Operator Hub for Kubernetes

Together with AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft the open source company Red Hat is launching OperatorHub.io, a new public registry for finding Kubernetes Operators.

Introduced by CoreOS in 2016 the Operator pattern is a way to automate infrastructure and application management tasks on Kubernetes orchestration platform. Examples for operational tasks are provisioning, scaling, and backup/restore of container-based services.

However, it's difficult for developers and Kubernetes administrators to find Operators that meet high quality standards. With the introduction of OperatorHub.io, Red Hat are helping to address this challenge by introducing a common registry to publish and find available Operators, says Diane Mueller in a blog post.

Some examples of Operators that are currently listed in OperatorHub.io include: Amazon Web Services Operator, Couchbase Autonomous Operator, CrunchyData’s PostgreSQL, etcd Operator, Jaeger Operator for Kubernetes, Kubernetes Federation Operator, MongoDB Enterprise Operator, Percona MySQL Operator, PlanetScale’s Vitess Operator, Prometheus Operator, and Redis Operator.

Each OperatorHub.io entry describes the Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), access control rules and references to the container image needed to install and more securely run an Operator, plus info like a description of its features and supported Kubernetes versions.

A contribution guide outlines the procedure for contributing Operators to the Hub. At first this will be reviewed manually, but automation is on the way, according to Mueller.