Kubernetes has made distributed systems easier to deploy and manage. As Kubernetes has become reliable, engineers have started to look for higher level abstractions we can define on top of Kubernetes.

An operator is a method of packaging, deploying, and managing a Kubernetes application.

Operators are useful for spinning up distributed systems such as Kafka, Redis, or MongoDB. These data systems are complicated, stateful applications with lots of failure domains. The operator framework enables a developer to deploy one of these complicated applications with less fear of the system crashing, or entering an erroneous state.

Rob Szumski is an engineer at Red Hat. He joins the show to discuss Kubernetes, the operator pattern, and his time at CoreOS, which was acquired by Red Hat.

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