A Kubernetes Operator for etcd

Etcd is a distributed key-value store, best known for being the data store used by Kubernetes itself. But what if you use etcd directly in your application, and you need it inside a Kubernetes cluster? Stateful applications, databases in particular, have traditionally posed a challenge for deployment and management in Kubernetes. We solved this problem with an Operator — A software package that extends the Kubernetes API and encodes operational knowledge specific to etcd.

In this talk we overview etcd and why running it in Kubernetes is difficult. After outlining what an Operator is and how it addresses our problem, we discuss ways of writing Operators, why we wrote our Operator the way we did, and talk though how it works for etcd. By the end of the session you'll know about Operators, the class of problems they can solve, and how to get started making one for yourself.