The Kubernetes container orchestrator can scale and connect stateless applications quite easily. Stateful applications require more work. Databases, caching systems, and file stores are harder to dynamically manage with data intact, and sometimes come with their own notion of clustering. Operators automate these tasks. Operators are Kubernetes agents that know how to deploy, scale, manage, and even upgrade complex applications.

In this talk, we'll illustrate the Operator concept, showing how Operators are built atop the Kubernetes third-party resources mechanism with a close examination of the open source etcd Operator. We'll demonstrate the Operator in action, deploying an etcd key-value store cluster atop Kubernetes, then scaling and replicating etcd pods in response to load and in the face of pod and node failures. The audience will learn how to deploy the etcd Operator and how to begin developing Operators to manage their own stateful applications.