The Kubernetes container orchestrator can scale and connect statelessapplications quite easily. Stateful applications require more work. Databases,caching systems, and file stores are harder to dynamically manage with dataintact, and sometimes come with their own notion of clustering. Operatorsautomate these tasks. Operators are Kubernetes agents that know how to deploy,scale, manage, and even upgrade complex applications. The Kubernetes container orchestrator can scale and connect statelessapplications quite easily. Stateful applications require more work. Databases,caching systems, and file stores are harder to dynamically manage with dataintact, and sometimes come with their own notion of clustering. Operatorsautomate these tasks. Operators are Kubernetes agents that know how to deploy,scale, manage, and even upgrade complex applications. In this talk, we'll illustrate the Operator concept, showing how Operators arebuilt atop the Kubernetes third-party resources mechanism with a closeexamination of the open source etcd Operator. We'll demonstrate the Operatorin action, deploying an etcd key-value store cluster atop Kubernetes, thenscaling and replicating etcd pods in response to load and in the face of podand node failures. The audience will learn how to deploy the etcd Operator andhow to begin developing Operators to manage their own stateful applications.