At Banzai Cloud we place a lot of emphasis on the observability of applications deployed to the Pipeline Platform, which we built on top of Kubernetes. To this end, one of the key components we use is Prometheus. Just to recap, Prometheus is: an open source systems monitoring and alerting tool a powerful query language (PromQL) a pull based metrics gathering system a simple text format for metrics exposition Problem statement Usually, legacy applications are not exactly prepared for these last two, so we need a solution that bridges the gap between systems that do not speak the Prometheus metrics format: enter exporters.

At Banzai Cloud we’re always looking for new and innovative technologies that support our users in their transition to microservices deployed on Kubernetes, using Pipeline. In recent months we’ve partnered with CoreOS and RedHat to work on Kubernetes operators. That project was opensourced today, and is now available on GitHub. If you read through the rest of this blog, you’ll learn what an operator is, and how to use the operator sdk to develop an operator through a concrete example we developed, here, at Banzai Cloud.