Vision

Kubernetes has become a standard de facto for the enterprise infrastructure management, especially for microservice-based infrastructures.

Kubernetes operators have become a common way to extend Kubernetes with domain objects and domain logic.

At the moment (2018-2019), operators are mostly written in Go and require advanced knowledge both of Go and Kubernetes internals. This raises the entry barrier to the operator development field.

In a perfect world of Kopf, Kubernetes operators are a commodity, used to build the domain logic on top of Kubernetes fast and with ease, requiring little or no skills in infrastructure management.

For this, Kopf hides the low-level infrastructure details from the user (i.e. the operator developer), exposing only the APIs and DSLs needed to express the user’s domain.

Besides, Kopf does this in one of the widely used, easy to learn programming languages: Python.

But Kopf does not go too far in abstracting the Kubernetes internals away: it avoids the introduction of extra entities and controlling structures (Occam’s Razor, KISS), and most likely it will never have a mapping of Python classes to Kubernetes resources (like in the ORMs for the relational databases).