Operator Framework is a toolkit to manage Kubernetes native applications

What is an Operator?

The goal of an Operator is to put operational knowledge into software. Previously this knowledge only resided in the minds of administrators, various combinations of shell scripts or automation software like Ansible. It was outside of your Kubernetes cluster and hard to integrate. With Operators, CoreOS changed that.

Operators implement and automate common Day-1 (installation, configuration, etc.) and Day-2 (re-configuration, update, backup, failover, restore, etc.) activities in a piece of software running inside your Kubernetes cluster, by integrating natively with Kubernetes concepts and APIs. We call this a Kubernetes-native application. With Operators you can stop treating an application as a collectionof primitives like Pods, Deployments, Services or ConfigMaps, but instead as a single object that only exposes the knobs that make sense for the application.