Building Catalogs of Operators for OLM the Declarative Way

The presentation discusses the new declarative plain text format for the underlying index of the Operator Package Manager (OPM) tool, which allows for editability, composability, and extensibility.

• The OPM tool had a problem with increasing surface area and bugs due to adding more sub-commands.
• The new format allows for operator and catalog authors to directly edit the contents of the index.
• The new format allows for composability, as operator authors can build just an index that contains their package.
• The new format allows for extensibility, as operator authors can make arbitrary changes to the index.
• An anecdote was given about how the new format allows for adding a bundle to a new channel without having to rebuild the entire index.

An example was given of how the new format allows for adding a bundle to a new channel without having to rebuild the entire index. Before, one would have to rebuild the entire index with the new bundle image that has the new channel reference. Now, one can just go into the index plain text file and add it to a new channel.

This presentation will cover an update from the Operator-lifecycle-Manager project - a suite of production-ready operators and tools that help manage the complexity of installing and upgrading operators on a Kubernetes cluster. This talk will focus on architectural updates to the set of tools that are used to build and maintain Catalogs of Operators, the goals and motivation behind the changes, the lessons learned using the old tools in production, and the future of OLM. Interested in joining the OLM community? We have weekly meetings every Thursday — check out https://github.com/operator-framework/community/blob/master/wg-olm/README.md to get started!