Kubernetes Operators: 5 Things You Truly Need to Know

Alex Vazquez
4 min readJul 18, 2022

Kubernetes Operator has been the new normal to deploy big workloads on Kubernetes, but as some of these principles don’t align immediately with the main concepts of Kubernetes usually generates a little bit of confusion and doubts when you need to use them or even create them.

What Are Kubernetes Operators?

Operators are the way to extend Kubernetes capabilities to manage big workloads where different options are related. In components with a distributed architecture such as monitoring system, log aggregation system, or even service mesh, you can find that. Based on the words from the Kubernetes official documentation , operators are defined as below:

Operators are software extensions to Kubernetes that use custom resources to manage applications and their components. Operators follow Kubernetes principles, notably the control loop.

Its primary usage is for standard services and not as much as the simple application or user workloads, but it could be used in cases even for that scenario.

How Does Kubernetes Operator Works?

The central concept behind the Kubernetes Operator is the extension concept. It is based on the definition and management of custom Kubernetes objects named Custom…

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Alex Vazquez

PSG Senior Architect at TIBCO Software with a focus on Cloud Development, Event Processing and Enterprise Integration