Lets us spin up a prometheus monitoring stack on our kubernetes cluster for monitoring metrics and scraping metrics from our services pretty much automatically.
- Thanos Operator
Spins up prometheus monitoring aggregations across multiple clusters with object storage backends, basically you can store metrics for years and query them with grafana.
- Strimzi Operator (Kafka)
Orchestrates a kafka cluster for kafka connect or even full blown kafka brokers with zookeeper.
- Istio Operator
Builds a service mesh on the cluster, offering MTLS and an envoy load balancer with some incredible flexibility
- Cert-manager operator
Lets us auto-generate certificates for resources via letsencrypt. This one is so nice for internal services and keeps certs valid without any hand holding
- Argo CD operator
We use this operator to deploy argocd pipelines and ship new services and updates via github actions in a very standardized way, and gives our users a UI to see what's going on.
- Actions runner controller
Using this actions runner controller we can offload github actions runners to self-hosted runners that automatically scale for pipeline workloads. Another set up and forget system and saves us from buying more github actions minutes.
Ultimately we use a ton of operators because it gives us an out of the box framework for tooling we need to deploy without reinventing the wheel. Of course some operators aren't worth using and it's definitely worth checking them out to see if they worth your time. A lot of them are really open to updates and changes also so you can help evolve them as you grow into other cases.
I will say, it's very important to understand what you are abstracting with these, you can absolutely blindly deploy services with operators and have it blow up in your face if you aren't sure what's going on behind the scenes or lack distributed service knowledge in production.
- Prometheus operator
Lets us spin up a prometheus monitoring stack on our kubernetes cluster for monitoring metrics and scraping metrics from our services pretty much automatically.
- Thanos Operator
Spins up prometheus monitoring aggregations across multiple clusters with object storage backends, basically you can store metrics for years and query them with grafana.
- Strimzi Operator (Kafka)
Orchestrates a kafka cluster for kafka connect or even full blown kafka brokers with zookeeper.
- Istio Operator
Builds a service mesh on the cluster, offering MTLS and an envoy load balancer with some incredible flexibility
- Cert-manager operator
Lets us auto-generate certificates for resources via letsencrypt. This one is so nice for internal services and keeps certs valid without any hand holding
- Argo CD operator
We use this operator to deploy argocd pipelines and ship new services and updates via github actions in a very standardized way, and gives our users a UI to see what's going on.
- Actions runner controller
Using this actions runner controller we can offload github actions runners to self-hosted runners that automatically scale for pipeline workloads. Another set up and forget system and saves us from buying more github actions minutes.
Ultimately we use a ton of operators because it gives us an out of the box framework for tooling we need to deploy without reinventing the wheel. Of course some operators aren't worth using and it's definitely worth checking them out to see if they worth your time. A lot of them are really open to updates and changes also so you can help evolve them as you grow into other cases.
I will say, it's very important to understand what you are abstracting with these, you can absolutely blindly deploy services with operators and have it blow up in your face if you aren't sure what's going on behind the scenes or lack distributed service knowledge in production.