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.

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:

      1. $ mkdir memcached-operator
    2. Change into the project directory:

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

      1. $ operator-sdk init \
      2. --plugins=ansible \
      3. --domain=example.com
  2. Create an API.

    Create a simple Memcached API:

    1. $ operator-sdk create api \
    2. --group cache \
    3. --version v1 \
    4. --kind Memcached \
    5. --generate-role (1)
    1Generates 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:

    1. $ make docker-build docker-push IMG=<registry>/<user>/<image_name>:<tag>
  4. Run the Operator.

    1. Install the CRD:

      1. $ make install
    2. Deploy the project to the cluster. Set IMG to the image that you pushed:

      1. $ make deploy IMG=<registry>/<user>/<image_name>:<tag>
  5. Create a sample custom resource (CR).

    1. Create a sample CR:

      1. $ oc apply -f config/samples/cache_v1_memcached.yaml \
      2. -n memcached-operator-system
    2. Watch for the CR to reconcile the Operator:

      1. $ oc logs deployment.apps/memcached-operator-controller-manager \
      2. -c manager \
      3. -n memcached-operator-system

      Example output

      1. ...
      2. I0205 17:48:45.881666 7 leaderelection.go:253] successfully acquired lease memcached-operator-system/memcached-operator
      3. {"level":"info","ts":1612547325.8819902,"logger":"controller-runtime.manager.controller.memcached-controller","msg":"Starting EventSource","source":"kind source: cache.example.com/v1, Kind=Memcached"}
      4. {"level":"info","ts":1612547325.98242,"logger":"controller-runtime.manager.controller.memcached-controller","msg":"Starting Controller"}
      5. {"level":"info","ts":1612547325.9824686,"logger":"controller-runtime.manager.controller.memcached-controller","msg":"Starting workers","worker count":4}
      6. {"level":"info","ts":1612547348.8311093,"logger":"runner","msg":"Ansible-runner exited successfully","job":"4037200794235010051","name":"memcached-sample","namespace":"memcached-operator-system"}
  6. Clean up.

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

    1. $ make undeploy

Next steps