Build Kubernetes Operators in Java without hassle. Inspired by operator-sdk.

Table of Contents

1. Features
2. Why build your own Operator?
3. Roadmap and Release Notes
4. Join us on Discord!
5. Usage

Features

• Framework for handling Kubernetes API events
• Automatic registration of Custom Resource watches
• Retry action on failure
• Smart event scheduling (only handle the latest event for the same resource)

Check out this blog post about the non-trivial yet common problems needed to be solved for every operator. In case you are interested how to handle more complex scenarios take a look on event sources .

Why build your own Operator?

• Infrastructure automation using the power and flexibility of Java. See blog post .
• Provisioning of complex applications - avoiding Helm chart hell
• Integration with Cloud services - e.g. Secret stores
• Safer deployment of applications - only expose cluster to users by Custom Resources

Roadmap and Release Notes

• Testing of the framework and all samples while running on a real cluster.
• Generate a project skeleton
• Generate Java classes from CRD
• Integrate with OLM (Operator Lifecycle Manager)

Overview of the 1.9.0 changes

• The Spring Boot starters have been moved to their own repositories and are now found at:
  • https://github.com/java-operator-sdk/operator-framework-spring-boot-starter
  • https://github.com/java-operator-sdk/operator-framework-spring-boot-starter-test
• Updated Fabric8 client to version 5.4.0
• It is now possible to configure the controllers to not automatically add finalizers to resources. See the

  Controller

  annotation documentation for more details.
• Added the possibility to configure how many seconds the SDK will wait before terminating reconciliation threads when a shut down is requested

Overview of the 1.8.0 changes

• The quarkus extension has been moved to the quarkiverse and is now found at https://github.com/quarkiverse/quarkus-operator-sdk

Overview of the 1.7.0 changes

• Doneable

  classes have been removed along with all the involved complexity

• Controller

  annotation has been simplified: the

  crdName

  field has been removed as that value is computed from the associated custom resource implementation
• Custom Resource implementation classes now need to be annotated with

  Group

  and

  Version

  annotations so that they can be identified properly. Optionally, they can also be annotated with

  Kind

  (if the name of the implementation class doesn't match the desired kind) and

  Plural

  if the plural version cannot be automatically computed (or the default computed version doesn't match your expectations).
• The

  CustomResource

  class that needs to be extended is now parameterized with spec and status types, so you can have an empty default implementation that does what you'd expect. If you don't need a status, using

  Void

  for the associated type should work.
• Custom Resources that are namespace-scoped need to implement the

  Namespaced

  interface so that the client can generate the proper URLs. This means, in particular, that

  CustomResource

  implementations that do not implement

  Namespaced

  are considered cluster-scoped. As a consequence, the

  isClusterScoped

  method/field has been removed from the appropriate classes (

  Controller

  annotation, in particular) as this is now inferred from the

  CustomResource

  type associated with your

  Controller

  .

Many of these changes might not be immediately apparent but will result in

404

Namescaped

Join us on Discord!

Discord Invite Link

Usage

We have several sample Operators under the samples directory:

• pure-java: Minimal Operator implementation which only parses the Custom Resource and prints to stdout. Implemented with and without Spring Boot support. The two samples share the common module.
• spring-boot-plain: Sample showing integration with Spring Boot.

There are also more samples in the standalone samples repo:

• webserver: Simple example creating an NGINX webserver from a Custom Resource containing HTML code.
• mysql-schema: Operator managing schemas in a MySQL database.
• tomcat: Operator with two controllers, managing Tomcat instances and Webapps for these.

Add dependency to your project with Maven:

  io.javaoperatorsdk
  operator-framework
  {see https://search.maven.org/search?q=a:operator-framework for latest version}

Or alternatively with Gradle, which also requires declaring the SDK as an annotation processor to generate the mappings between controllers and custom resource classes:

dependencies {
    implementation "io.javaoperatorsdk:operator-framework:${javaOperatorVersion}"
    annotationProcessor "io.javaoperatorsdk:operator-framework:${javaOperatorVersion}"
}

Once you've added the dependency, define a main method initializing the Operator and registering a controller.

public class Runner {

  public static void main(String[] args) {
    Operator operator = new Operator(DefaultConfigurationService.instance());
    operator.register(new WebServerController());
  }
}

The Controller implements the business logic and describes all the classes needed to handle the CRD.

@Controller
public class WebServerController implements ResourceController {

  // Return the changed resource, so it gets updated. See javadoc for details.
  @Override
  public UpdateControl createOrUpdateResource(CustomService resource,
      Context context) {
    // ... your logic ...
    return UpdateControl.updateStatusSubResource(resource);
  }
}

A sample custom resource POJO representation

@Group("sample.javaoperatorsdk")
@Version("v1")
public class WebServer extends CustomResource implements
    Namespaced {

}
public class WebServerSpec {
  private String html;
  public String getHtml() {
    return html;
  }
  public void setHtml(String html) {
    this.html = html;
  }
}

Deactivating CustomResource implementations validation

The operator will, by default, query the deployed CRDs to check that the

CustomResource

CHECK_CRD_ENV_KEY

false

Automatic generation of CRDs

To automatically generate CRD manifests from your annotated Custom Resource classes, you only need to add the following dependencies to your project:

  io.fabric8
  crd-generator-apt
  provided

The CRD will be generated in

target/classes/META-INF/fabric8

target/test-classes/META-INF/fabric8

test

java-operator-sdk.io

mycrs

• mycrs.java-operator-sdk.io-v1.yml

• mycrs.java-operator-sdk.io-v1beta1.yml

NOTE:

Quarkus users using the

quarkus-operator-sdk

extension do not need to add any extra dependency to get their CRD generated as this is handled by the extension itself.

Quarkus

A Quarkus extension is also provided to ease the development of Quarkus-based operators.

Add this dependency to your project:

  io.quarkiverse.operatorsdk
  quarkus-operator-sdk
  {see https://search.maven.org/search?q=a:quarkus-operator-sdk for latest version}
  

Create an Application, Quarkus will automatically create and inject a

KubernetesClient

OpenShiftClient

Operator

ConfigurationService

ResourceController

@QuarkusMain
public class QuarkusOperator implements QuarkusApplication {

  @Inject
  Operator operator;
  public static void main(String... args) {
    Quarkus.run(QuarkusOperator.class, args);
  }
  @Override
  public int run(String... args) throws Exception {
    operator.start();
    Quarkus.waitForExit();
    return 0;
  }
}

Spring Boot

You can also let Spring Boot wire your application together and automatically register the controllers.

Add this dependency to your project:

  io.javaoperatorsdk
  operator-framework-spring-boot-starter
  {see https://search.maven.org/search?q=a:operator-framework-spring-boot-starter for
    latest version}
  

Create an Application

@SpringBootApplication
public class Application {

  public static void main(String[] args) {
    SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
  }
}

Spring Boot test support

Adding the following dependency would let you mock the operator for the tests where loading the spring container is necessary, but it doesn't need real access to a Kubernetes cluster.

  io.javaoperatorsdk
  operator-framework-spring-boot-starter-test
  {see https://search.maven.org/search?q=a:operator-framework-spring-boot-starter for
    latest version}
  

Mock the operator:

@SpringBootTest
@EnableMockOperator
public class SpringBootStarterSampleApplicationTest {

  @Test
  void contextLoads() {
  }
}