Advanced Kubernetes Operators Development

How to build a production-standard Operator based on Kubebuilder. Tips and pitfalls

In the previous article ㉿ (Kubernetes Operator for Beginners — What, Why, How), I have described Kubernetes Operators’ concepts and how to implement one with a simple example of auto-generating ServiceAccount and ClusterRoleBinding through Kubebuilder.

But that example is rough and does not meet the production standards, just for illustration. 😞

poor operator, by author

• CRD Condition is not set. The Condition status is generally a monitoring field used by various kubectl tools to observe the resources’ status.
• Without a health check, we can not add a liveness probe and readiness probe.

Operators that run in production obviously need more.

This article lists multiple aspects of building a stable and functional Operator by improving the previous one. And we will discuss some pitfalls encountered during the development.

Before starting, let’s review what Operator Controller is and what functions we want to achieve with it in Kubebuilder.

• Controller implements and manages the reconciliation loop
• Controller reads the desired state from the resources’ YAML and…