Charmed Operators – An Implementation of the Operator Pattern

Two trends make application operations increasingly challenging. First, applications are evolving into complex compositions of applications. Second, the rising number of secuity vulnerabilities underlines the need for defined and automated operations.

Canonical develops the open-source Juju framework for building “software operators” and running them on metal, private or public clouds and Kubernetes. A software operator is a design pattern in which the processes for operating applications are implemented in dedicated software. Since it is a design pattern, we can assume the operator concept as a best practice. In addtion, Juju goes further: Juju also integrates applications – thus creating an integrated IT landscape controlled by uniform tooling.

The presentation starts with a short introduction, reports about experiences in the development of software operators and introduces the relevant open source projects of Canonical.

Michael Jaeger is Product Manager at Canonical for Cloud Native Application Ecosystems. He graduated from the Technical University of Berlin with a degree in Computer Engineering. After his studies, he worked as a research assistant and wrote his doctoral thesis in the field of distributed systems, also at the TU Berlin. His professional career then took him to Siemens AG in Munich. There he held various positions and roles, including IT consultant, trainer, software architect and most recently as “Senior Key Expert Open Source Software”. Michael has worked for Siemens as a maintainer in two open source projects: The Linux Foundation project FOSSology and the Eclipse Foundation project SW360.