kubebuilder VS crossplane

The Spin operator uses the Kubebuilder framework and contains a Spin App Custom Resource Definition (CRD) and controller. It watches Spin App Custom Resources and realizes the desired state in the K8s cluster. Aside from the immediate benefits gained by running Wasm workloads in k8s, additional optimizations such as Horizontal Pod Scaling (HPA) and k8s Event-driven Autoscaling (KEDA) can be achieved in a pinch.

kubebuilder: brew install kubebuilder

The operator that I've been working on is designed to manage the full lifecycle of a QuestDB database instance, including version and hardware upgrades, config changes, backups, and (eventually) recovery from node failure. I used the Operator SDK and kubebuilder frameworks to provide scaffolding and API support.

Recently, I've been spending a lot of time writing a Kubernetes operator using the go operator-sdk, which is built on top of the Kubebuilder framework. This is a list of a few tips and tricks that I've compiled over the past few months working with these frameworks.

Since we built our operator using the Kubebuilder framework, most standard monitoring tasks were handled for us out-of-the-box. Our operator automatically exposes a rich set of Prometheus metrics that measure reconciliation performance, the number of k8s API calls, workqueue statistics, and memory-related metrics. We we were able to ingest these metrics into pre-built dashboards by leveraging the grafana/v1-alpha plugin, which scaffolds two Grafana dashboards to monitor Operator resource usage and performance. All we had to do was add these to our existing Grafana manifests and we were good to go!

I wrote a CSI driver and some operators. I admire K8s, because you can find solution to almost any problem in the source code - API versioning, load balancing, request throttling, optimistic concurrency, security, and much much more. I recommend https://book.kubebuilder.io/ It is similar to Operator SDK, but without Openshift-specific stuff. It gradually introduces you to many k8s concepts, and follows design patterns that k8s uses internally.

Do you mean this: https://book.kubebuilder.io/ ?

https://book.kubebuilder.io/ all you need to know

A better way to write an operator these days is to use kubebuilder [1].

My complaint is that I have seen orgs write operators for random stuff, often reinventing the wheel. Lot of operators in orgs are result of resume driven development. Having said that it often comes handy for complex orchestration.

[1]https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubebuilder

did anyone adopt in production https://crossplane.io ?

- https://github.com/crossplane/crossplane/blob/master/design/one-pager-composition-environment.md

In the overall scheme of things , look at services like backstage.io , crossplane.io and opslevel.com to get ideas. This is not necessarily an endorsement of the services. If all you want is to handle cloud resources and that's it, Terraform can be enough with what ever flavor of web technologies you and your team are comfortable with and can support it along the way. Doesn't take much to create a js based website to collect data from a form, or use other means to collecting data as long as its recorded and transparent for accountability.

XRs are written in a fully declarative manner. And when I am building my XR from underlying managed resources provided by some crossplane provider I need to parametrize resources, use conditionals and create arrays of resuorces The issues of declarativeness in the world of automation are well known- we typically resort to some form of templating and we invent some imperative expressions into that templating language/format. This is currently not very well supported with Crossplane however Crossplane team realizes this issue and they are conteptualizing solution here

I have an idea for a project that would interface with Crossplane. The project has some code that would save tons of time if I could use it directly in my project, but it is located in the internal directory. I can't import the modules directly, but the project is open sourced under an Apache 2.0 license, so the code itself is available for use under that license.

There are always new projects like crossplane that sit on top on architecture systems like terraform, vagrant. The pressure to abstract away any sort of resources is mounting, companies can save a lot by for example by alt hosting S3 endpoints. The train is going the direction not to tie anything to a specific platform implementation if its not a must. Most of the companies I work with use AWS as a hosting provider, but Microsoft for github and related CI matters. As I learned, AWS quality is very dependent on location, eu-central-1 is dead stable for our use cases serving about millions requests a day.

Practically, you'll be replacing stock k8s resources (deployments) with custom ones like Argo Rollouts with Keda autoscaling, so you have to plan the respective Gitops CD pipeline (fluxcd/argocd with some crossplane), as well.