operator

Note: Please note that the Tower Operator this post references is currently in early alpha status, and has no official support from Red Hat. If you are planning on using Tower for production and have a Red Hat Ansible Automation subscription, you should use one of the official Tower installation methods. Someday the operator may become a supported install method, but it is not right now.

I have been building a variety of Kubernetes Operators using the Operator SDK. Operators make managing applications in Kubernetes (and OpenShift/OCP) clusters very easy, because you can capture the entire application lifecycle in the Operator's logic.

It wouldn't surprise me if you've never heard of Mcrouter. Described by Facebook as "a memcached protocol router for scaling memcached deployments", it's not the kind of software that everyone needs.

There are many scenarios where a key-value cache is necessary, and in probably 90% of them, running a single Redis or Memcached instance would adequately serve the application's needs. There are more exotic use cases, though, where you need better horizontal scaling and consistency.

Kubernetes is taking over the world of infrastructure management, at least for larger-scale operations, and best practices have started to solidify. One of those best practices is the cultivation of Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) to describe your applications in a Kubernetes-native way, and Operators to manage your the Custom Resources running on your Kubernetes clusters.

In the Drupal community, Kubernetes uptake has been somewhat slow, but is on the rise. Just like with Docker adoption for local development, the tooling and documentation has been slowly percolating. For example, Tess Flynn from TEN7 has been boldly going where no one has gone before (oops, wrong scifi series!) using the Force to promote Drupal usage in a Kubernetes environment.