Kubecon EU 2023: Operator Day hosted by Canonical – recordings available

The Operator Day at KubeCon EU 2023, hosted by Canonical, took place on Monday, 17 April  2023. We thank everyone for attending the event. Our thanks go out especially to those who engaged with each other during the sessions, asked questions and contributed to our  interactive event. If you missed this 6th edition of Operator Day, we have good news: The recordings are available as a playlist on YouTube!

Integrating and operating workloads across clusters and clouds is often tedious and error prone. This Operator Day started with a 5-minute demo from Simon Aronsson. It showed a  typical situation: MongoDB on virtual machines using LXD, WordPress in one and the Canonical Observability Stack (COS) in another K8s cluster. Attendees were able to see how much easier it is to use software operators for  setting up and integrating these applications.

Presenting popular open source software

After the introduction, presentations and demos showed how to integrate and operate a selection of popular open source applications:

• How to setup your WordPress instance and easily integrate with observability, presented by Yang Soo Yoon
• How to scale MySQL and perform backups, presented by Shayan Patel and Paulo Machado
• Presenting the anatomy of the operator for the Landscape Server, by Mitch Burton and Rajan Patel
• How to reduce the toil of operating Kubelfow’s complex software stack by Andreea Munteanu

Hands-on software operator technology

In addition to the example cases, experts presented development topics for software operators, including:

• An operator for handling certificates using Let’s Encrypt, by Ghislain Bourgeois
• Handling of secrets in software operators, by Ben Hoyt
• Running software operators and MicroK8s on System Z mainframes, by Lorenzo Cavassa

All these works can take advantage of the recently published Juju provider for Terraform, presented by Jon Seager and Juan Tirado. The provider integrates the power of Juju,  Canonical’s open source software operator framework, into Terraform.

Last but not least: Operator Day ended with a panel discussion covering trends and challenges. The discussion reminded everyone that software operators focus on Day-2 operations but also covered thoughts on how advances in AI could help teams operate applications. A big thank you goes out to our attendees and guest panelists Lachlan Evenson (Cloud Native OSS at Azure) and Tim Hockin (Principal Software Engineer, Google).

Are you interested in previous Operator Day events?

If you missed the previous Operator Day events or want to learn more about software operators, explore the presentations held at the earlier events, co-located at past KubeCon conferences. If you are interested in developing operators, have a look a the following videos:

• 30 mins to Stand up a Simple App by Daniela Plascencia
• Observability for Developers from Simon Aronsson
• The Juju Dev Tools Suite from Pietro Passotti

Read more about developing operators

• Start with our introduction to Juju and Charmed Operators
• See our collection of Charmed Operators on Charmhub.io
• The Juju Charmed Operator Lifecycle Manager
• The Juju Charmed Operator SDK
• See more videos to start with about Juju and Charmed Operators

Have questions or suggestions about Operator Day? Please contact us:

Contact Canonical