Top 10 operators deployed on Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS

An Operator provides an automated way to install and configure a Kubernetes-native application on your Red Hat OpenShift instance. It’s not an application installer, but a self-contained configuration for every required component in the stack. Operators are so useful that every Red Hat OpenShift install features OperatorHub, where you can browse and easily install Operators verified to work with Red Hat OpenShift. Operators are understandably popular add-ons for most OpenShift users, and here are the top 10 we see our users install most often.

deployment-validation-operator

It’s always a good idea to have someone check your work, and that’s exactly what the Deployment Validation Operator (DVO) is for. DVO compares your deployment and cloud resources to common industry best practices to give you confidence that your applications are configured correctly and optimally. It’s a linter for your cloud, running kubelinter in the background and sending reports to Prometheus for monitoring.

cluster-logging

Looking through logs is the first step toward diagnosing problems or opportunities for improvement. For you to check the logs, though, you need there to be logs. The Cluster Logging Operator (CLO) provides an API to help you collect and aggregate logs from all pods and nodes in your cluster. CLO is a configuration manager, so it starts, configures, and monitors the logging daemons and any other component that generate logs.

elasticsearch-operator

Elasticsearch is a popular search and analytics engine used for traditional text searches, and also log and business analytics. The Elasticsearch Operator makes it easy to install and maintain Elasticsearch on your cluster by verifying your pod layout, providing a kubectl interface to help you manage Elasticsearch, and monitoring your cluster. If you want to add Elasticsearch to your cloud, this is the way to do it.

aws-efs-csi-driver-operator

Amazon’s Elastic File System (EFS) is a scalable shared filesystem for your cloud infrastructure. If you use the EFS Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver supports dynamic and static provisioning, and enables automated filesystem creation, and allows your containers to mount an EFS volume. Install the driver using the aws-efs-csi-driver operator.

openshift-gitops-operator

Argo CD is a continuous delivery tool that helps you manage your infrastructure and application configurations using GitOps. With Argo CD, you can create templates for common configurations, take corrective actions as required after a Git commit, sync Secrets with your secrets manager, and receive alerts when your cluster requires attention.

The openshift-gitops-operator uses Argo CD so you can manage your cluster with Git. If you’re not managing your infrastructure as code yet, then this is a great place to start.

jaeger-operator

The more applications become distributed, the harder it can be to pinpoint the source of a problem when an error occurs. Even when you determine which component (the network, a microservice, a database, a configuration, and so on) is the source of an error, you may not know the cause of it because you may not yet understand what data was sent to the component. To get a bigger picture of how your applications and services interact, you need distributed tracing. Jaeger Tracing is an open source solution for collecting data from all the disparate components of your cluster, and correlating it together so you can see the relationships between all of those different parts. Install jaeger-operator to add this important feature to your OpenShift instance.

Service Mesh operator

If you run distributed applications on your cloud, you’ll benefit from the Service Mesh operator. The interaction of your applications, and most importantly the network of microservices that an application is composed of, is a Service Mesh. When a distributed application gets very large or very complex, it can become difficult to understand and manage. There are popular operators to help with that, but Red Hat offers a comprehensive solution in the form of the Service Mesh operator.

Based on the open source Istio project, the Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh operator allows you to deploy a special sidecar proxy onto services in your mesh to intercept all network communication between microservices. This enables service discovery, load balancing, service-to-service authentication, metrics, monitoring, and tracing, access control, and much more.

kiali-operator

Kiali is a console for your Service Mesh. After you’ve installed Kiali, you can view visualizations of the topology of your cluster (or even your multi-cluster), see reports on the health of your Service Mesh, manipulate application routing (and even inject a fault for resiliency testing), and much more.

Install the Kiali operator to improve your understanding of your Service Mesh.

openshift-pipelines-operator-rh

For continuous integration and continuous delivery of applications, there’s no better infrastructure support than Tekton. With Tekton Pipelines you can assemble a robust CI/CD solution built of individual Tasks, defined especially for your requirements. With Tekton Triggers, you can make the instantiation of those pipelines event-driven. There’s a suite of useful tooling around Tekton, including the tkn command, a web UI, and an API. The openshift-pipelines-operator-rh operator sets your cloud up as a robust CI/CD development environment.

oadp-operator

The OpenShift API for Data Protection (OADP) operator uses the open source Velero project to help you backup and restore applications running on your cloud. Velero is a tool for Kubernetes, designed to backup and restore data, and to migrate resources and persistent volumes from one cluster to another. The OpenShift developers maintain a friendly fork of Velero that’s customized to handle the nuances of OpenShift. The OADP operator is one of the best ways for you to protect the time and work you put into your cloud.

Operators on OpenShift

When you want to set up an application or configuration, but you’re getting lost in documentation or you just don’t have the time, then take a look at OperatorHub in OpenShift. Let OperatorHub do the hard work for you, and take advantage of other people’s knowledge. With the right Operators installed, your OpenShift cluster stands only to benefit, and so do you.