reference.md

Reference Documentation

The implementation generalizes and extends DependentResource and Workflow features of Java Operator SDK and more. Although it is limited only to Kubernetes resources it makes it very easy to use in language-independent (DependentResources in JOSDK are also covering external resources) way.

Glue resource

Glue is the heart of the operator. Note that GlueOperator controller just creates a new Glue with a related resource, for each parent custom resource. Glue defines childResources (sometimes referred to as managed resources) and related resources:

Child resources

Attributes

The childResources section is a list of resources to be reconciled (created, updated, deleted by controller). It has several attributes:

• name - is a mandatory unique (unique also regarding related resources) attribute. The resource is referenced by this name from other places, typically other resource templates and JSCondition. If it is used in a JSCondition the name must be a valid JavaScript variable name.
• clusterScoped - a flag to indicate if the resource is cluster scoped. Default value is false. It is mandatory to set this for cluster scoped resources.
• resource - is the desired state of the resource applied by default using Server Side Apply. The resource is templated using qute templating engine, other resources can be referenced from the templates, see below.
  If the resource is namespace scoped and the namespace attribute is not specified in .metadata automatically the namespace of Glue is used.
• dependsOn - is a list of names of other child resources (not related resources). The resource is not reconciled until all the resources which it depends on are not reconciled and ready (if there is a readyPostCondition present). Note that during the cleanup phase (when a Glue is deleted) resources are cleaned up in reverse order.
• condition - a condition to specify if the resource should be there or not, thus even if the condition is evaluated to be true and the resource is created, if one of the following reconciliations the condition is evaluated to false the resource is deleted. (Same as reconcilePrecondition in Java Operator SDK)
• readyPostCondition - condition to check if the resource is considered to be ready. If a resource is ready all the resources, which depend on it can proceed in reconciliation.

Built-in conditions

At the moment there are two types of built-in conditions provided:

• ReadyCondition - check if a resource is up and running. Use it only as a readyPostCondition. See sample usage here.
• JSCondition - a generic condition, that allows writing conditions in JavaScript. As input, all the resources are available which are either child or related. The script should return a boolean value. See accessing the related resource in WebPage sample, and cross-referencing resources here.

Related resources

Related resources are resources that are not reconciled (not created, updated, or deleted) during reconciliation, but serve as an input for it. See sample usage within Glue here The following attributes can be defined for a related resource:

• name - same as for child resource, unique identifier, used to reference the resource.
• clusterScoped - if the related resource is cluster scoped. Default is false.
• apiVersion - Kubernetes resource API Version of the resource
• kind - Kubernetes kind property of the resource
• resourceNames - list of string of the resource names within the same namespace as Glue.

Referencing other resources

Both in JSCondition and resource templates other resources can be referenced by the name.

If there are more resourceNames specified for a related resource, the resource is referenced in a form [related resource name]#[resource name]. See sample here.

When a resource B references another resource A, resource A will be guaranteed to be in the cache - especially for initial reconciliation when the resource is created - only if B depends on A on it. This is natural, in other words, after reconciliation up-to-date version of the resource is guaranteed to be in the cache after reconciliation. See sample resource cross-referencing here.

The metadata of Glue can be referenced under glueMetadata, see sample here

In addition to that in GlueOperator the parent attribute can be used to reference the parent resource on which behalf the resources are created. See sample here.

Reconciliation notes

The reconciliation is triggered either on a change of the Glue or any child or related resources.

On every reconciliation, each child resource is reconciled, and if a resource is updated, it is added to a cache, so it is available for templating for a resource that depends on it.

The DependentResource implementation of JOSDK makes all kinds of optimizations on the reconciliation which are utilized (or will be also here).

GlueOperator resource

The specs of GlueOperator are almost identical to Glue, it just adds some additional attributes:

• parent - specifies the resources handled by the operator. Targets are usually custom resources but not necessarily, it also works with built-in Kubernetes resources. With the following sub-attributes:
  • apiVersion and kind - of the target custom resources.
  • labelSelector - optional label selector for the target resources.
  • clusterScoped - optional boolean value, if the parent resource is cluster scoped. Default is false.
• glueMetadata - optionally, you can customize the Glue resource created for each parent resource. This is especially important when the parent is a cluster scoped resource - in that case it is mandatory to set. Using this you can specify the name and namespace of the created Glue. See usage on the sample secret-copy-operator.

See minimal GlueOperator here.

Deployment

Implementation is using Quarkus Operator SDK (QOSDK), the default configuration options defined by QOSDK can be overridden using environment variables.

With every release, there are Kubernetes resources provided to make an initial deployment very simple. See kubernetes.yml in release assets. While we will provide more options, users are encouraged to enhance/adjust this for their purposes.

Since the project is a meta-controller, it needs to have access rights to all the resources it manages. When creating specialized roles for a deployment, roles should contain the union of required access rights for all the child resources, specifically: ["list", "watch", "create", "patch", "delete"] and ["list", "watch"] for related resources.

Cluster and various (single or multiple) namespace-scoped deployments are supported.

Passing configuration values

To pass configuration values use environment variables for the Deployment.

Use the format that is defined in quarkus.

Sharding with label selectors

The operator can be deployed to only target certain Glue or GlueOperator resources based on label selectors. You can use simply the configuration from Quarkus Operator SDK to set the label selector for the reconciler.

The configuration for Glue looks like:

quarkus.operator-sdk.controllers.glue.selector=mylabel=myvalue

for GlueOperator:

quarkus.operator-sdk.controllers.glue-operator.selector=mylabel=myvalue

This will work with any label selector for GlueOperator and with simple label selectors for Glue, thus in key=value or just key form.

With Glue there is a caveat. GlueOperator works in a way that it creates a Glue resource for every custom resource tracked, so if there is a label selector defined for Glue it needs to add this label to the Glue resource when it is created. Since it is not trivial to parse label selectors, in more complex forms of label selectors (other the ones mentioned above), the labels to add to the Glue resources by a GlueOperator needs to be specified explicitly using glue.operator.glue-operator-managed-glue-label config key (which is a type of map). Therefore, for a label selector that specified two values for a glue:

quarkus.operator-sdk.controllers.glue.selector=mylabel1=value1,mylabel2=value2

you need to add the following configuration params:

glue.operator.glue-operator-managed-glue-label.mylabel1=value1

glue.operator.glue-operator-managed-glue-label.mylabel2=value2

This will ensure that the labels are added correctly to the Glue. See the related integration test.

Label selectors managed resources

For efficiency reasons, there is always one informer registered for a single resource type, even if there are more Glue-s or GlueOperators handled by a deployment that contains resources for the same type. For example, if there are multiple Glues managing ConfigMaps there will always be just one informer for a ConfigMap.Therefore, label selectors can be configured only per resource type, not per Glue or GlueOperator.

To configure a label selector for a resource use glue.operator.resource-label-selector (Map), which is followed by the identifier of the resource type in the key, and the value is the label selector itself. The resource type is in the form: [group/]version#kind. For example to define a label selector for ConfigMaps set:

glue.operator.resource-label-selector.v1#ConfigMap=mylabel=samplevalue

or for Deployment:

glue.operator.resource-label-selector.apps/v1#Deployment=mylabel=samplevalue

Implementation details and performance

Informers are used optimally, in terms of that, for every resource type only one informer is registered in the background. Event there are more Glue or GlueOperator resources containing the same resource type.

The templating and some of the Javascript condition is probably the most time-consuming and resource-intensive part which will be continuously improved in the follow-up releases.

Samples

1. WebPage GlueOperator, serves a static website from the cluster. To achieve this, it creates three resources a Deployment running Nginx, a ConfigMap that contains the HTML file an mounted to nginx, a Service and an optional Ingress to expose the static web page.
2. Muatation Hook Deployment, described on the project home page.
3. Additional Glue samples, note that these are used for integration testing.
4. Additional GlueOperator samples, also used for integration testing.

Related documents

• Dependent Resources documentation in Java Operator SDK
• Workflows documentation in Java Operator SDK