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Getting started with Operator SDK for Ansible-based Operators

The Operator SDK includes options for generating an Operator project that leverages existing Ansible playbooks and modules to deploy Kubernetes resources as a unified application, without having to write any Go code.

The Red Hat-supported version of the Operator SDK CLI tool, including the related scaffolding and testing tools for Operator projects, is deprecated and is planned to be removed in a future release of OKD. Red Hat will provide bug fixes and support for this feature during the current release lifecycle, but this feature will no longer receive enhancements and will be removed from future OKD releases.

The Red Hat-supported version of the Operator SDK is not recommended for creating new Operator projects. Operator authors with existing Operator projects can use the version of the Operator SDK CLI tool released with OKD 4 to maintain their projects and create Operator releases targeting newer versions of OKD.

The following related base images for Operator projects are not deprecated. The runtime functionality and configuration APIs for these base images are still supported for bug fixes and for addressing CVEs.

  • The base image for Ansible-based Operator projects

  • The base image for Helm-based Operator projects

For the most recent list of major functionality that has been deprecated or removed within OKD, refer to the Deprecated and removed features section of the OKD release notes.

For information about the unsupported, community-maintained, version of the Operator SDK, see Operator SDK (Operator Framework).

To demonstrate the basics of setting up and running an Ansible-based Operator using tools and libraries provided by the Operator SDK, Operator developers can build an example Ansible-based Operator for Memcached, a distributed key-value store, and deploy it to a cluster.

Prerequisites

Additional resources

Creating and deploying Ansible-based Operators

You can build and deploy a simple Ansible-based Operator for Memcached by using the Operator SDK.

Procedure

  1. Create a project.

    1. Create your project directory:

      $ mkdir memcached-operator

    2. Change into the project directory:

      $ cd memcached-operator

    3. Run the operator-sdk init command with the ansible plugin to initialize the project:

      $ operator-sdk init \
    --plugins=ansible \
    --domain=example.com

  2. Create an API.

    Create a simple Memcached API:

    $ operator-sdk create api \
    --group cache \
    --version v1 \
    --kind Memcached \
    --generate-role (1)
    1 Generates an Ansible role for the API.

  3. Build and push the Operator image.

    Use the default Makefile targets to build and push your Operator. Set IMG with a pull spec for your image that uses a registry you can push to:

    $ make docker-build docker-push IMG=<registry>/<user>/<image_name>:<tag>

  4. Run the Operator.

    1. Install the CRD:

      $ make install

    2. Deploy the project to the cluster. Set IMG to the image that you pushed:

      $ make deploy IMG=<registry>/<user>/<image_name>:<tag>

  5. Create a sample custom resource (CR).

    1. Create a sample CR:

      $ oc apply -f config/samples/cache_v1_memcached.yaml \
    -n memcached-operator-system

    2. Watch for the CR to reconcile the Operator:

      $ oc logs deployment.apps/memcached-operator-controller-manager \
    -c manager \
    -n memcached-operator-system
      Example output
      ...
I0205 17:48:45.881666       7 leaderelection.go:253] successfully acquired lease memcached-operator-system/memcached-operator
{"level":"info","ts":1612547325.8819902,"logger":"controller-runtime.manager.controller.memcached-controller","msg":"Starting EventSource","source":"kind source: cache.example.com/v1, Kind=Memcached"}
{"level":"info","ts":1612547325.98242,"logger":"controller-runtime.manager.controller.memcached-controller","msg":"Starting Controller"}
{"level":"info","ts":1612547325.9824686,"logger":"controller-runtime.manager.controller.memcached-controller","msg":"Starting workers","worker count":4}
{"level":"info","ts":1612547348.8311093,"logger":"runner","msg":"Ansible-runner exited successfully","job":"4037200794235010051","name":"memcached-sample","namespace":"memcached-operator-system"}

  6. Delete a CR.

    Delete a CR by running the following command:

    $ oc delete -f config/samples/cache_v1_memcached.yaml -n memcached-operator-system

  7. Clean up.

    Run the following command to clean up the resources that have been created as part of this procedure:

    $ make undeploy

Next steps