Kubernetes (K8s) Operators serve as effective tools for automating certain aspects of the control plane. In fact, if you already possess an operator and are considering building your end-to-end SaaS solution, please refer to this page.

However, it's important to recognize that having a K8s operator represents a first step towards building SaaS:

• Restricted to 1 K8s cluster: You'll need separate components to orchestrate or bin-pack tenants/resources across multiple K8s clusters as you scale.
• No infrastructure management: Infrastructure management must be automated separately or integrated with the Operator itself.
• Failure handling: In distributed systems, dependent services may experience temporary failures. The Operator operates as one large control loop with no structured method for handling failures.
• Limited visibility and control:
  • No fine-grained insight into step-by-step execution.
  • No native support to pause or resume new rollouts in case of issues.
• Service evolution and upgrades:
  • Operator complexity increases when upgrading stateful systems.
  • Evolution may slow down if operator deployment is required.
• Coupled architecture: Introduces coupling between the control plane and data plane, potentially leading to cascading failures if not managed carefully.
• Maintenance burden: Custom operators demand ongoing maintenance and updates.

Furthermore, K8s operators lack several essential features crucial for SaaS, including metering, billing, serverless autoscaling with scale down to zero, monitoring with auto-recovery, advanced patching, cloud-native capabilities, automated operations, compliance measures, developer productivity tools, integrations, access control, and more.

For further insights, please visit this page.