Berlin Buzzwords

Berlin Buzzwords is Europe’s leading conference for modern data infrastructure, search and machine learning and is focused on open source software projects. At #bbuzz leading experts present, demystify and educate an international audience on a range of modern industry trends. It provides an independent, vendor neutral platform for developers, engineers, IT architects, analysts and data scientists who are interested in information retrieval, the searchability of large amounts of data and big data processing. Berlin Buzzwords further offers a place to network within and across the different communities, and to amplify the idea of Open Source above and beyond the realm of software development.

Also visit the session of our member Stackable, Lars Francke

Lessons learned writing 10+ Kubernetes Operators

Session Abstract
I’ll talk about all the mistakes we made and all the lessons we learned developing a data platform on top of a dozen or so Kubernetes operators so you don’t have to go through the same ordeal.

Session Description
We have written more than 10 operators for Kubernetes. When we started our journey in 2020, we thought lots of people surely must have done this already. We could not have been more wrong. As it turns out, most people write a single operator: For their product. All of them slightly different. Everyone has their own way of specifying Pod overrides, storage, TLS or LDAP support, log aggregation, monitoring, and so on. This is before we have entered the land of horror that is Kerberos, multi-homing and various other fun topics like certifications. We knew that we would be writing more than one we made sure to move as much functionality into a common framework as possible. That is also the reason we did not pick Go as our programming language of choice but are using Rust instead. Its support for generic (which Go lacked at that point) made it much easier to extract common functionality. In this talk we will tell you about some of the things we learned while writing our operators, pitfalls, open questions, and a plea to collaborate on some standards in the operator world. We – as a community – can do better than today’s state, I am sure of it. But you will not only hear the developer’s side, but you will also hear the side of a user and partner of ours who appreciates the ease of use across multiple operators and utilize the Stackable platform to build on prem data platforms for their customers. Would we do it again? Yes. Would we do it differently? Also, yes.