Before we describe what our LINSTOR® Operator does, it is a good idea to discuss what a Kubernetes Operator actually is. If you are already familiar with Kubernetes Operators, feel free to skip the introduction.
Introduction
CoreOS describes Operators like this:
An Operator is a method of packaging, deploying and managing a Kubernetes application. A Kubernetes application is an application that is both deployed on Kubernetes and managed using the Kubernetes APIs and kubectl tooling.
That is quite a lot to grasp if you are new to the concept of Operators. What users want to do is their work, without having to worry about setting up infrastructure. Still, there is more to a software lifecycle than just firing up the application in a cluster once. This is where an Operator comes into play. In my opinion, a good analogy is to think of a Kubernetes Operator as an actual human operator. So what would the responsibilities of such a human operator be?
A human operator would be an expert in the business logic of the software that she runs and the dependencies that need to be fulfilled to run the software. Additionally, the operator would be responsible for configuring the software: to scale it, to upgrade it, to make backups, and so on. This is also the responsibility of a Kubernetes Operator implemented in software. It is a software component that is built by experts for a particular containerized software. This Operator is executed by an administrator who isn’t necessarily an expert for that particular software.
A Kubernetes Operator is executed in the Kubernetes cluster itself. In contrast to shell scripts or Ansbile playbooks, which are pretty generic, the Operator framework has one specific purpose, as well as access to Kubernetes cluster information. Additionally, they are managed by standard Kubernetes tools and not some external tools for configuration management. An Operator has a managed lifecycle on its own and is managed by the lifecycle manager.
LINSTOR Operator
CoreOS FAQ contains the following sentence:
Experience has shown that the creation of an Operator typically starts by automating an application’s installation and self-service provisioning capabilities, and then evolves to take on more complex automation.
This pretty much sums up the current state of the linstor-operator. The project is still very young and the current focus was on automating the setup of the LINSTOR cluster. If you are familiar with LINSTOR, you know that there is a central component named the LINSTOR controller, and workers — named LINSTOR satellites — that actually create LVM volumes and configure DRBD® to provide data redundancy.
Currently, the Operator can add new nodes/kubelets to the LINSTOR cluster by registering them with their name and network interface configuration by the LINSTOR controller. A second important task is that a LINSTOR satellite can actually provide storage to the cluster. Therefore, the linstor-operator can also register one or multiple storage pools. Metrics of the LINSTOR satellite set’s storage pools are exposed by the operator. Therefore the system administrator saves a lot of time, because the LINSTOR Kubernetes Operator automates a lot of standard tasks, which were previously performed manually.
Future work
There is a lot of possible future work that can be done. Some tasks are obvious, some will be driven by actual input of our users. For example we think that configuring storage is one of the pain points for our uses. Therefore, having a sidecar container that can discover and prepare storage pools to be consumed by LINSTOR might be a good idea. In a dynamic environment such as Kubernetes it might be worthwhile to handle node failures in clever ways. We also have container images that can inject the DRBD kernel module into the running host kernel, which could help users with getting started with DRBD. High Availability is always an important topic and related to that using etcd as database backend. Further, we want to tackle one of the core tasks of Operators, which is managing upgrades from one LINSTOR controller version to the next.
Thanks to Hayley for reviewing this blog post, she is too busy doing the actual work. This is just a subset of the capabilities we plan for the linstor-operator. Stay tuned for more information!
