Lessons learned writing 10+ Kubernetes Operators - Lars Francke and Jannik Heyl
summary
Claims a portfolio of 15+ operators, built in Rust with generics to extract reusable code, and reports concrete pain points: no operator design standards, flaky OperatorHub listings, and onerous OpenShift certification that requires repeated manual reruns. Tooling and testing use k3s, kind, Tilt and Cutle for integration tests, but cloud test runs are expensive and brittle. Notes statefulsets limitations (PVC resizing, stable indexing) and urges shared CRD conventions for TLS, discovery, overrides and backups.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Introduction and speakers
- 1:28Why Stackable and lake house
- 8:37Lack of operator standards
- 10:23Challenges in operator development
- 14:40Choosing Rust over Go
- 17:09OpenShift certification struggles
- 19:56Platform dependencies and consistency
- 22:50Testing operators at scale
- 25:38StatefulSets limitations
- 27:44Helpful tools for operators
- 29:10Need for declarative standards
- 31:13Enterprise requirements over features
- 32:17Q&A session
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