Deploying your operator with Kubernetes deployment

The easiest way to deploy your operator is to use a traditional Kubernetes deployment. Thanks to Quarkus, you can create a small container image that contains your operator and deploy it to your Kubernetes cluster.

It is surely possible to build the image of your operator and create all required Kubernetes manifests manually, but Quarkus provides all required tooling to do that for you, which can greatly simplify the overall workflow.

Building the operator image

Quarkus applications automatically generate with a few Dockerfile files in src/main/docker but this is not the only way to build the image of your operator. You can read about the available extensions that do this for you automatically in the Container images guide.

After you have chosen and added the relevant container extension to your operator project (e.g., quarkus extension add container-image-docker) and configured the relevant configuration for your image deployment, you can build and push the image of your operator with the following command:

$ ./mvnw install \
  -Dquarkus.container-image.build=true \
  -Dquarkus.container-image.push=true \
  -Dquarkus.container-image.image=<registry>/<user>/<image>:<tag>

Or you can optionally specify the image name in the application properties:

quarkus.container-image.image=<registry>/<user>/<image>:<tag>

Check the available options in the container image guide.

Deploying CRDs

Before deploying your operator, you need to deploy the required Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) to your cluster. You can generate the required CRD manifests with the following command:

$ ./mvnw package

This will generate the required CRD manifests in the target/kubernetes folder. You can then apply them to your cluster with the kubectl command:

$ kubectl apply -f target/kubernetes/<crd-name>.<crd-group>-<crd-version>.yml

Deploying to Kubernetes/OpenShift

To deploy your operator to Kubernetes or OpenShift, you need to add one of the relevant extensions to your project:

# Kubernetes
$ quarkus extension add kubernetes

# OpenShift
$ quarkus extension add openshift

Note that openshift is also an alternative to container image extensions so you need to adjust your projects accordingly, if you want to use different container image extensions.

After you have added the relevant extension, you can generate the required Kubernetes or OpenShift manifests with the normal build command:

$ ./mvnw package

# Or if you don't have your image configured in the application properties
$ ./mvnw package -Dquarkus.container-image.image=<registry>/<user>/<image>:<tag>

This will generate the required manifests in the target/kubernetes or target/openshift folder. You can then apply them to your cluster with the kubectl or oc command:

$ kubectl apply -f target/kubernetes/kubernetes.yml

# Or for OpenShift
$ oc apply -f target/kubernetes/openshift.yml