Data on Kubernetes Meetup May 23

Percona has started to participate in Data on Kubernetes (DoK) meetings about Kubernetes Operators. These meetings are an initiative of DoK meetups that spotlight DoK case studies. In this blog post series, I will summarize the topics covered in each meeting.

On May 23, very interesting topics were discussed on the agenda. Let’s begin to summarize it.

We start with a new project proposal, which is called: Distributed Systems Operator Interface (DSOI). It is proposed by Adheip Singh from DataInfra, Nitish Tiwari from Parseable, and Itamar Marom from AppsFlyer.

This project is a set of best practices for building Kubernetes operators for distributed systems. The spec defines standard practices that can help define custom resources (CR). It consists of Kubernetes-native CRDs and specs and is not bound to any specific application. There are already two operators built using this set of practices:

• Parseable Kubernetes Operator
• Control Plane For Apache Pinot

If you want to contribute, send proposals, join datainfra-workspace or raise bugs in the GitHub repository of DSOI.

As the second item on the agenda, we have an update about the DoK Operator SIG Project Proposal - Security & Hardening Guide. This project is proposed by Robert Hodges, Altinity Inc.

This project is a guide to establishing a baseline for secure data management on Kubernetes by fortifying the database operators. The guide aims to identify the typical attack surfaces that exist for databases running on Kubernetes. It will establish a collection of best practices for enhancing their security through the utilization of operators.

Robert mentioned that he connected to TAG Security, which in turn led to a link to BadRobot, which is a scanner that checks operators for excessive privileges. Also, Robert presented to DoK Bay Area last week to introduce the problem of operator security.

For the Operator security & hardening guide, we can raise issues on sig-operator. They are currently seeking volunteers and contributors for their project; Find operator-security-hardening project on GitHub, or feel free to write Robert Hodges rhodges@altinity.com.

Finally, we have an update of the Operator Feature Matrix (OFM)

The Operator Feature Matrix (OFM) is a project from the Data on Kubernetes Community to create a standardized and vendor-neutral feature matrix for various Kubernetes operators that manage stateful workloads. This project is proposed by Alvaro Hernandez, and it is definitely a good project to contribute if you are looking to improve the end-user experience with the use of workloads in Kubernetes.

CloudNativePG project sent feedback to improve OFM. CloudNativePG is the Kubernetes operator that covers the full lifecycle of a highly available PostgreSQL database cluster. Planning to create a website for end-user adoption

There are other (non-Postgres) technologies, like Apache Druid, jumping on OFM. This is a work in progress.

The end of June is being considered for a 1.0 freeze, before which it is required to get as much feedback as possible. If you are interested, feedback can be as simple as opening an issue to discuss something; or sending a PR requesting improvements (or both). Feel free to do it on OFM GitHub Repo. ∎