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The operator framework gives vendors the ability to manage the life cycle of the middleware they provide—for example, the Dell CSI operator provides drivers for Dell storage products. Operators attempt to encode the operational knowledge that is required for various stateful applications. Depending on its complexity, the operator can be used to fully automate the life cycle management (LCM) of various applications and middleware, scale automatically, and handle abnormalities gracefully.
Like Helm, a universal package manager for Kubernetes, an operator can be used to configure and install middleware. Unlike Helm, operators are application-specific—an operator must be installed to manage each middleware application.
Operators are designed to simplify Day-2 operations by automatically deploying, updating, and maintaining specific application deployments. This simplification is achieved through the creation of CRDs that are managed through a control loop that is embedded in the operator.
The following figure shows the benefits that operators can provide, depending on their complexity: