Re: Does Helm has a plan to support the complete Operator maturity level?
Devdatta Kulkarni
Hi Anil,
To complement and add to Paul and Matt's response.
Going a step further beyond understanding the difference between an Operator and Helm, there are also some Operators in the community that are written to automate distribution and management of Helm charts, such as the Helm Operator from Operator SDK and our
project KubePlus (https://github.com/cloud-ark/kubeplus). These Operators essentially wrap a Kubernetes-native API around Helm charts. The need for such Operators arises in situations when there
are multiple teams or personas involved, such as provider of the application and consumer of the application, - say a DevOps team is looking to deliver an application as a service to their product team. For such a service-based delivery model, the typical
day 2 operations include things like - ability to apply resource policies at application-level, ability to troubleshoot the deployed applications, ability to track resource consumption per application instance, etc. Generic Operators like KubePlus can help
with these operations. If you are looking
for day 2 operations such as the above, you can check out KubePlus.
-Devdatta
From: cncf-helm@... on behalf of Matt Farina Sent: Wednesday, October 6, 2021 2:04 PM To: Anil Kumar Cc: cncf-helm@...; Paul C Subject: Re: [cncf-helm] Does Helm has a plan to support the complete Operator maturity level?
I’d like to add to what Paul said.
Helm and operators are two different types of things. They don’t solve the same problem. Think of it this way, would I ask apt or yum to implement ansible features? The answer is obviously no because they solve two different problems and can be
used to compliment each other. Ansible regularly uses RPMs and Debian packages.
Helm is a package manager like apt or yum. It is used to install, upgrade, and uninstall packages.
Operators are more complex. To quote the original definition of
operators…
It’s about managing instances of applications. This reminds me of something like ansible or Chef. It’s more like Chef conceptually because Chef did things with agents and a pull based model.
These two can complement each other. An operator can use Helm and charts for the install, upgrade, and uninstall elements. In fact, some do.
So, I would not expect to have Helm support operator capabilities because they solve different problems. The fact that they’re compared that way is marketing rather than technical.
- Matt Farina
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