CoreOS Inc. is looking to alleviate some of the complexity that comes with using Kubernetes, the open-source application container cluster manager, to manage modern distributed applications.

The company has created new open-source software called “Operators” that make cloud-native apps easier to run on Kubernetes. Operators are software that understands specifics of each application and can extend the Kubernetes application programming interface to automate the creation, configuration and management of multiple instances of complex stateful applications in a cluster.

“An Operator makes managing complex software on top of Kubernetes easy,” said Brandon Philips, chief technology officer of CoreOS. “It is for all of those apps that aren’t simple to horizontally scale. The big idea is that by installing an operator into your cluster you will get powerful new capabilities like being able to on-demand deploy new distributed databases or monitoring services declaratively with simple commands. This is another step forward in making distributed systems easy to install, run and update.”

Specifically, CoreOs is introducing two kinds of Operators – the etcd Operator and the Prometheus Operator, to manage specific aspects of Kubernetes. The etcd Operator is designed to create, configure and manage etcd clusters on Kubernetes. Etcd is a distributed reliable key-value store for the most critical data in a distributed system, and also serves as the primary datastore of Kubernetes itself.

Upon installation, the etcd Operator provides a host of new distributed system capabilities for clusters, including the ability to manage them declaratively. So, for example, users can specify a desired state for a specific cluster, and the operator will transition it to that state in the safest manner possible.

As for the Prometheus Operator, this serves to help users manage and monitor their Kubernetes resources. It works by creating, configuring and managing instances of Prometheus, a monitoring, metrics and alerting tool that’s a project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

By making available its new Operator tools, CoreOS is helping to ease one of developers’ biggest headaches around Kubernetes and distributed apps, RedMonk industry analyst Fintan Ryan told SiliconANGLE.

“The configuration and operation of the complex underlying components necessary for creating successful applications has been a struggle for some,” Ryan said. “With the introduction of the Operator concept, and implementations for etcd and Promethus, CoreOS is taking complex software and making it easy to work seamlessly on Kubernetes, allowing developers to focus on delivering business value.”

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