Understanding OperatorHub

About OperatorHub

OperatorHub is the web console interface in OKD that cluster administrators use to discover and install Operators. With one click, an Operator can be pulled from its off-cluster source, installed and subscribed on the cluster, and made ready for engineering teams to self-service manage the product across deployment environments using Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM).

Operators on OperatorHub are packaged to run on OLM. This includes a YAML file called a cluster service version (CSV) containing all of the CRDs, RBAC rules, deployments, and container images required to install and securely run the Operator. It also contains user-visible information like a description of its features and supported Kubernetes versions.

The Operator SDK can be used to assist developers packaging their Operators for use on OLM and OperatorHub. If you have a commercial application that you want to make accessible to your customers, get it included using the certification workflow provided on the Red Hat Partner Connect portal at connect.redhat.com.

OperatorHub architecture

The OperatorHub UI component is driven by the Marketplace Operator by default on OKD in the openshift-marketplace namespace.

OperatorHub custom resource

The Marketplace Operator manages an OperatorHub custom resource (CR) named cluster that manages the default CatalogSource objects provided with OperatorHub. You can modify this resource to enable or disable the default catalogs, which is useful when configuring OKD in restricted network environments.

Example OperatorHub custom resource

  1. apiVersion: config.openshift.io/v1
  2. kind: OperatorHub
  3. metadata:
  4.   name: cluster
  5. spec:
  6.   disableAllDefaultSources: true (1)
  7.   sources: [ (2)
  8.     {
  9.       name: "community-operators",
  10.       disabled: false
  11.     }
  12.   ]
1disableAllDefaultSources is an override that controls availability of all default catalogs that are configured by default during an OKD installation.
2Disable default catalogs individually by changing the disabled parameter value per source.

Additional resources