Red Hat Inc.’s Operator Framework has come a long way in a short time since Operators were first conceptualized in 2016. Software developers have experienced innovation that allow the creation, configuration and automation of modern applications at every level of the computing stack. And with Red Hat and strategic partners offering an ecosystem of certified community operators for enterprise applications, they’re better managing application life cycles for today’s business needs.

“As engineers, we’re always trying to make our lives easier. Infrastructure automation certainly is a concept here. What Operators does is it elevates those same needs to more of an application construct level,” explained Gou Rao (pictured, left), founder and chief technology officer of Portworx Inc., when asked about Operators vs. Automation. “So it’s a piece of intelligent software that is watching the entire run-time of an application as opposed to provisioning infrastructure and stepping out of the way.” 

Rao explained further: “Think of it as a living being; it is constantly running and reacting to what the application is doing and what its needs are. So, on one hand you have automation that sets things up and then the job is done. Here the job is never done; you’re sort of right there as a side car along with the application.”

Rao and Julio Tapia (pictured, right), executive director of partner ecosystem and community development — Cloud Platforms Business Unit at Red Hat, spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer) during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in San Diego, California. They discussed the logistics of partner ecosystems and how Operators fit in. (*Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Miniman: I hear the term cloud-native storage; what does that really mean? Back a few years ago, containers were stateless. I didn’t have my persistent storage. It was super challenging as to how we deal with this. And now we have some options, but what is the goal of what we’re doing here?

Rao: There really is no notion of a stateless application, right? Especially, when it comes to enterprise applications. Cloud-native storage signifies a couple of things. First of all, the consumer of storage is not a machine anymore, right? Typical storage systems are designed to provide storage to either a virtual machine or a hardware server. The consumer of storage is now a container that’s running inside of a machine. And, in fact, an application is never just one container; it’s many containers running on different systems, so it’s a distributed problem. 

So what cloud-native storage means is the following things: Providing container granular data services; being application aware, meaning that you’re providing services to many containers that are running on different systems; and facilitating the data life cycle management of those applications from a Kubernetes way. The user experience is now driven through Kubernetes as opposed to a storage admin driving that functionality. So it’s these three things that make a platform cloud native. 

Troyer: How does the Operator Framework relate to OpenShift versus upstream Kubernetes? Is it an OpenShift and Red Hat specific thing?

Tapia: OperatorHub.io is a listing of Operators that includes community Operators. And then we also have certified Operators. The community Operators run on any Kubernetes instance. The certified Operators make sure that we run on OpenShift specifically. So that’s kind of the distinction between those two.

Rao: The Operator that we have, we were able to achieve level five certification. The level five signifies just the amount of automation that’s built into it. So the concept of having Operators help people deploy these complex applications, that’s a very important concept in Kubernetes itself. So, glad to be a Red Hat partner.  

Miniman: I remember a Red Hat Summit where you talked about some bits [of Operators]. So, give us a little walk around the show, some of the highlights from Operators, the ecosystem.

Tapia: So we have a huge ecosystem. The ISVs play a big part of this. We’ve got Operators, database partners, security partners, app monitoring partners, storage partners. Yesterday we had an OpenShift Commons event, and we showcased five of our big Operator partnerships with Couchbase, with MongoDB, with Portworx, with StorageOS, and with Dynatrace. But we have a lot of partners in a lot of different areas that are creating these Operators, are certifying them, and they’re starting to get a lot of use with customers.  

Miniman: For people that aren’t yet engaged in the ecosystem of Operators, how can they learn more and get involved?

Tapia: We’re excited to work with everybody; our ecosystem includes customers, partners, contributors, so as long as you’re all in on Operators, we’re ready to help. We’ve got tools, we’ve got documentation, we have workshops, we have training, we have certification programs. We also can help you with go to market. We’re very fortunate to have a huge customer footprint, and so for those partners that have solutions, databases, storage solutions, there’s a lot of joint opportunities out there that we can participate in.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE