[spenczar5]

Operators make sense when you need to automatically modify resources in response to changes in the cluster's state.

An example that has come up for me is an operator for a Kafka Schema Registry. This is a service that needs some credentials in a somewhat obscure format so it can communicate very directly with a Kafka broker. If the broker's certificates (or CA) are modified, then the Schema Registry needs to have new credentials generated, and needs to be restarted. But the registry shouldn't (obviously) have direct access to the broker's certificates. Instead, there's a more-privileged subsystem which orchestrates that dance; that's the operator.