Percona XtraDB and MongDB Operators for Kubernetes

Percona, a database software company, released Percona Kubernetes Operator for XtraDB Cluster and Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona Server for MongoDB. According to Percona, the XtraDB and MongoDB operators are designed to remove the burden of repetitive tasks and provide consistency and reliability in Kubernetes environments.

Kubernetes Operators orchestrate an application environment to respond to increasing demand and recover from certain failures. Operators use the open source operator framework to implement packaging, deploying, and managing Kubernetes applications. Launched by CoreOS , operators help automate the running of a Kubernetes application, and the framework was designed to specifically address the needs of stateful applications, such as version management and backups.

Percona provides database software products and support in areas such as cost and risk reduction, reducing vendor buy-in, and database best practices. Its original project,  Percona Server for MySQL , is an open source, drop-in replacement for MySQL databases that promotes improved performance, scalability, and instrumentation.

The Percona Operator for XtraDB deploys, manages, and scales an XtraDB cluster. XtraDB is a Percona open source version of the InnoDB storage engine for MySQL and MariaDB that offers improved performance and scalability and features such as query logging with per-query statistics. The Percona XtraDB Cluster implements  ProxySQL for load balancing and Percona XtraBackup for MySQL for database backups. The operator also includes the Percona Monitoring and Management tool, which provides details on the performance and usage of the cluster.

The Percona Operator for MongoDB similarly provides methods to deploy, manage, and scale a MongoDB replica set and includes a backup feature and tools for monitoring the performance of the database. The Percona MongoDB nodes can be used as data storage nodes or as note arbiters.

Alongside Percona, several enterprise and open source operators for MySQL and MongoDB are available to manage database lifecycles in Kubernetes. MongoDB provides an enterprise operator which deploys a MongoDB instance with a single command and includes MongoDB monitoring and backup platforms as well as the MongoDB infrastructure products  Ops Manager and Cloud Manager . The operator is beta and not recommended for production use.  Ultimaker , a 3D printing company, also lists a MongoDB operator that creates, manages, and deletes MongoDB replica sets, automatically initializes the replica set configuration in the master node, and schedules backups to Google Cloud.

Oracle provides a MySQL Operator that creates, configures and manages MySQL InnoDB clusters. The operator can create and delete MySQL InnoDB clusters, automate database backups, failure detection, and recovery, and use backups to restore a database. The operator is alpha and there may be breaking changes in future releases.  Presslabs , a Wordpress hosting platform, shares a MySQL operator that uses the Percona Server. The operator is also in an alpha state and not recommended for production.

To learn more about the Percona operators visit the Percona Cloud Native Autonomous Database Initiative . The operator framework community maintains a  listing of operators , including additional database options such as CouchDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB, and PostgreSQL. General information about the operator framework can be found at the operator hub .