Top 5 operators for Red Hat OpenShift

In the 1980s, the spreadsheet was considered such a valuable tool that would make buying a computer just to run it worthwhile. The term coined to describe such an application was a killer app. 

Is there an equivalent for Red Hat OpenShift? When it comes to tools that boost the value of the platform as a whole, we need to look at Red Hat OpenShift operators. There are generally speaking 2 types of operators. Some install and run an app (e.g., a database or a message queue) on an OpenShift cluster for you, then keep managing it by watching resources and acting automatically as needed. Others teach your cluster entirely new concepts, like GitOps, CI/CD pipelines or certificate management, and expose them declaratively via custom resource definitions (CRDs). We’ve picked 5 of the most important operators that really showcase what Red Hat OpenShift is capable of.

1: OpenShift GitOps

Of all modern development and deployment models, GitOps is perhaps the most popular. By solidifying on Git as the single source of truth (for example, based on  GitHub and GitLab), GitOps provides a declarative framework ideal for managing containerized workloads for both cloud-native applications and AI. It inherently provides an audit record of all changes and continuously prevents drift arising from manual changes applied directly to the cluster.

With security and reliability remaining top priorities for engineering, GitOps workflows automate both infrastructure maintenance and deployment testing. By integrating Argo Rollouts into those workflows, teams can easily execute progressive deployment strategies, such as canary and blue-green releases, to test and ship updates with zero downtime.

The Red Hat OpenShift GitOps operator is our productized version of the Argo CD upstream project and enables developers and administrators alike to take full advantage of this model, driving streamlined application delivery for dev teams and consistent cluster configuration for platform operations.

2: Cluster logging

It’s easy to see logging as a type of plumbing activity. But those logs you’re saving aren’t just a tool for finding out why a pod is crash-looping; they also contain a wealth of information about how your system is performing. With proper logging systems in place, troubleshooting becomes much more efficient; they make optimization easier as well, which is almost as important.

Whether you’re auditing log data for compliance reasons or digging through infrastructure messages to find lost packets, logs are the lifeblood of many daily tasks for operations. With the rise of AI, logs can also be ingested and analyzed at scale, removing the need to grep endlessly for specific problem entries.

The cluster logging operator for Red Hat OpenShift is based on the Vector (for log collection and forwarding) and Loki (for log aggregation and storage) open source projects. With this operator in place, users can bring whatever tool they’d like to bear upon the problem. From Splunk, to grep, to Elasticsearch, to OpenSearch, the cluster logging operator enables you to digest and understand whatever is going on in Red Hat OpenShift.  

3: OpenShift Data Foundation

For cloud-native applications, you may think of storage as a passive background utility, a digital warehouse where files go to sit quietly on disk. But in Red Hat OpenShift, storage isn’t just about retention; it’s the active foundation that powers a wide variety of workloads, from containerized applications consuming block or object storage, to virtual machines (VMs) and intelligent pipelines across your infrastructure. Without a unified data strategy for balancing speed, scale, and availability, operations teams become overwhelmed.

Whether you’re running containers alongside VMs through Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization powered by high-performance block storage, or accelerating data-hungry AI workloads using object storage with local caching, fast data access is non-negotiable. Managing those vast pools of data shouldn't mean navigating separate tools or maintaining multiple storage solutions, either. Instead, you want a single pane of view that spans multiple object datasets, simplifying governance no matter where your data lives.

Based on the Ceph and Rook upstream projects, the Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation and its operators help teams gain a comprehensive cloud-native storage platform tailored directly to the environment. Complete with enterprise-grade regional and metropolitan disaster recovery solutions designed specifically for Red Hat OpenShift, the OpenShift Data Foundation operators keep your workloads resilient, high-performing, and fully protected against unexpected downtime.

4: The cert-manager operator

One of the things that teams often take for granted is their underlying network infrastructure, and specifically the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) that supports it. Increasingly powerful  AI tools have created new and unexpected attack vectors. In response to this, companies are moving towards zero trust architectures that require short-lived, strictly enforced, and cryptographically verifiable identities for every containerized workload. For network communications, this identity is encapsulated in the TLS certificate.

In an environment where a single expired certificate can bring down mission-critical applications, meeting these zero-trust standards manually quickly becomes an operational nightmare. Per-workload identities significantly increase the number of existing certificates, and shorter certificate lifespans accelerate the rate of issuance and renewal for these certificates. The solution: automate the entire certificate lifecycle.

The cert-manager operator for Red Hat OpenShift brings this automation to your OpenShift ecosystem in a scalable and reliable manner. The operator provides declarative, cloud-native certificate management, enabling DevSecOps teams to enforce end-to-end encryption and mTLS across all cluster traffic without adding manual overhead to engineering workflows. The cert-manager operator includes a number of powerful features, including completely automated TLS certificate renewal and issuance, automated management of certificate authority (CA) bundles, and deep integration with most popular enterprise PKIs (such as HashiCorp Vault, Venafi, and more). All this functionality is available through kubectl, oc or the GitOps tool of your choice.

5: NMState

Red Hat OpenShift’s Kubernetes NMState operator gives cluster admins a Kubernetes-native way to manage networking on the hosts themselves. Instead of logging into nodes and running NetworkManager commands or maintaining custom scripts, you define the desired network setup in a NodeNetworkConfigurationPolicy (NNCP). The operator takes care of applying that configuration to the right nodes and provides resources for checking what is configured and whether the change succeeded.

This is especially useful when your servers have a mix of network interface cards (NICs) and network assignments. You can use node selectors and NNCPs to describe things like bonds, virtual LANs, Linux bridges, IP addresses, and routes for different groups of hosts. That makes it much easier to consistently configure nodes that need access to different physical or logical network segments without building a pile of per-server automation.

The biggest operational benefit is that host networking becomes declarative, repeatable, and visible through Red Hat OpenShift. Network configuration can live alongside the rest of your cluster configuration in Git, be rolled out across selected nodes, and be checked for successful application. For clusters with complicated secondary networking, NMState can turn what would otherwise be tedious host-by-host configuration into a much more manageable part of normal Red Hat OpenShift operations.

Get started with OpenShift operators

The OperatorHub is available via the OpenShift Container Platform web console and is the interface that cluster administrators use to discover and install operators. You can also browse certified operators in the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog.