NEWS

Canonical’s Open Operator Collection Now Supports Linux and Windows

Nov. 30, 2020, 2:22 p.m. in Kubernetes

Topline

Canonical has the largest collection of application operators: "Canonical’s Open Operator Collection", an open-source initiative to provide a large number of operators that you can integrate for common workloads.
Canonical operator's support also extends to traditional applications on Linux and Windows.

An operator is a software that is responsible for the lifecycle management of an application. .jpg

Key Facts

1
Canonical has generalized its operator pattern to include traditional applications on Windows and Linux, providing a consistent model-driven operator framework for application management. The framework would be available to use in baremetal and virtual machines.
2
Canonical operators include declarative integration points that can be reused for automating integration between operators from various vendors. The integration code to handle dynamic integration during deployment is embedded in each operator, ensuring availability and security best practices throughout the process.
3
Canonical’s Juju, the cloud DevOps tool, works at a higher level than other similar programs with ‘charms,’ which are shareable, reusable, and repeatable expressions of DevOps best practices.
4
All operators from the Open Operator Collection are open source and are not dependent on any proprietary infrastructure components.
5
The Juju OLM (Operator Lifecycle Manager) used by the Open Operator Collection goes beyond basic provisioning and lifecycle management capabilities. It enables model-driven architecture with event delivery, event serialization, persistent state, leader election, application status monitoring, application messages, and integration data exchange capabilities.

An operator is a software that is responsible for the lifecycle management of an application.

Red Hat and Kubernetes had launched the Operator Framework, an open-source toolkit that makes designing and managing Kubernetes-based applications effective, automated, and scalable.

The Operator Framework includes:

Operator SDK that allows developers to build Operators based on their expertise without the knowledge of Kubernetes API complexities.
Operator Lifecycle Management is responsible for the installation, updating, and management of the lifecycle of all Operators running across a Kubernetes cluster.
Operator Metering that reports usage to Operators providing specialized services.

Operators can be developed in many languages. Canonical operators, for instance, are developed in python. Charmhub provides a pure Python Operator Framework to handle the low-level lifecycle management and integration details.

The Open Operator Collection is available at Charmhub.io.

We are excited to generalize the operator pattern to include traditional applications on Linux and Windows, for a consistent model-driven operator framework for application management, across bare metal, virtual and Kubernetes estates.
Sohini Roy
Canonical Product Manager