[hardwaresofton]

tl;dr - this is a rant. the operator pattern should stay a pattern. "framework" and "application" are meaningless these days. Stop trying to make things so easy a "monkey could do it".

No no no no no. The words "framework" and "application" are so meaningless now that even reading this post is draining.

CoreOS pioneered the Operator pattern, but I think building up that pattern into a framework to get people developing it away from the knowing the basics of k8s is such a mistake. The operator pattern falls out of the primitives that k8s offers (there's literally a concept called a controller) -- this makes it seem like another app platform. I think the level of abstraction isn't even right, this is like trying to enable people to write daemons without knowing anything about linux or signals or processes.

Then again, I also dislike tools like Helm because they do the same thing. Why is everyone so in a rush to make inevitably leaky abstractions to make everything so easy a monkey could do it? All you're doing is encouraging cookie cutter programmers to write cookie cutter poorly understood code that will break on someone inevitably.

All essential complexity introduced by features in the layer below an abstraction cannot be simplified, it can only be hidden or removed. It is OK for things to be hard, as long as they are simple (in the rich hickey easy vs simple analogy).