OLM: A Declarative Way to Install, Manage, and Upgrade Operators

The presentation discusses the Manifest Bundle format and the Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM) in Kubernetes, and its future plans to support arbitrary resources and integrate with Cert Manager.

• Manifest Bundle format provides a way to standardize how to package and associate Kubernetes manifests with container images
• OLM manages the lifecycle of operators and services in Kubernetes clusters
• OLM plans to support bundles with arbitrary resources and integrate with Cert Manager
• OLM is part of the Operator Framework, which has a public working group and community page

The Manifest Bundle format allows for the grouping of operator bundles and exposing them within the cluster. The Index is a composition of bundles and is a powerful tool for using and installing different operator services onto your cluster. OLM plans to become more modular in what kind of applications media types it accepts and support different types of applications in the future.

This presentation will cover the Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM) — a suite of production-ready operators and tools that help manage the complexity of installing and upgrading operators on a Kubernetes cluster. OLM provides the following features out of the box: ▪ Over-the-Air Operator Updates and Catalogs ▪ A Rich Dependency Model ▪ Operator Discoverability ▪ Cluster Stability This talk will focus on the following topics: ▪ Introduction to OLM and its APIs ▪ Discovering and installing an operator via OLM ▪ Features that OLM provides on-cluster ▪ The operator bundle format ▪ The future direction of the OLM project 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!