An opinionated catalog of operators adapted for OKD
OKD is a community distribution of Kubernetes (K8s), a collection of software and design patterns to operate applications at scale.
OKD shares many of the same underlying cluster components as the commercial distribution RedHat OpenShift.
The Operator pattern is the concept of running "meta" software within your cluster to manage your applications and supporting components.
For example, you as a cluster operator may provision a OpensourceDatabaseSoftware (an operator-defined Custom Resource), and the operator would take care of provisioning the underlying resources (Deployments, ConfigMap, Secrets, Pods, etc) on your behalf, based on the configuration you provide.
Within OKD, we use a suite of tools called Operator Framework to manage operators within the cluster (an operator for operators). With Operator Framework we can access operators from central catalogs (such as this one) and install them within our cluster.
This catalog contains a curated selection of operators.
Kubernetes, by nature, has a lot of different ways to accomplish the same thing (such as data storage, CI/CD pipelines, log management). The choice can be overwhelming for administrators, and can create challenges integrating them together and into OKD.
Within RedHat OpenShift, the private catalog contains distributions of opensource projects to suit a variety of standard workflow requirements. For example, OpenShift Pipelines is an OpenShift-tuned distribution of the opensource project Tekton.
Similarly, this public catalog contains packaged solutions to common use cases, based off opensource projects.
In many cases we will use the same code and packaging that adapts operators for OpenShift but altered to remove trademarked branding related to RedHat.
Compared to many other Kubernetes distributions, OKD has additional security restrictions, assumptions and features that mean an operator or application that would work "out of the box" on a more vanilla Kubernetes distribution, does not function on OKD. For example, additional security profiles may need to be applied, or MachineConfigs applied to add node features.
This is a test project and we are seeking contributors. Please join the OKD Development Working Group or reach out on Slack in #okd-dev.