Overcoming Helm limitations with Kubernetes Operators

Over the last decade, Kubernetes has become the de-facto application orchestrator for containerised and distributed applications in the cloud. It brought itself, backed by The Linux Foundation® and a vibrant open-source community, a broad set of tools forming one of the richest ecosystem but among all, Helm is by far one of the most popular and used. While Helm is a great tool, it is not without its flaws, that become more and more evident as the complexity of the applications grows. The Operator Pattern is a way to address this issue, since provides more control over the application lifecycle and allows to extend the Kubernetes API. This thesis is focused on the technical adoption of the Operator Pattern, highlighting its advantages through case studies and emphasizing how it can be used to solve Helm limitations.