1 Introduction to the Operator Lifecycle Manager Module

A Kubernetes operator is a design pattern for writing code to automate tasks and extend Kubernetes. An operator is a set of concepts you can use to define a service for Kubernetes and helps to automate administrative services in Kubernetes.

The Operator Lifecycle Manager module installs an instance of Operator Lifecycle Manager into a Kubernetes cluster, which you can use to manage the installation and lifecycle of operators in a Kubernetes cluster. The Operator Lifecycle Manager is a package manager that interacts with operator registries. For more information about the Operator Lifecycle Manager, see the upstream Operator Lifecycle Manager documentation.

OperatorHub is an operator registry that contains upstream Kubernetes operators that you can use to deploy operators in a cluster. The OperatorHub is at:

https://operatorhub.io/

Operator Lifecycle Manager in many ways performs the same tasks as Helm. A major extra feature that Operator Lifecycle Manager provides is that it has built-in support to validate Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) inside Kubernetes software. Operators with CRDs can use these to ensure dependencies are met and no interfaces are duplicated. Otherwise, Operator Lifecycle Manager manages deployments in a similar way to Helm.