What is Nebula Operator¶

Concept of Nebula Operator¶

Nebula Operator is a tool to automate the deployment, operation, and maintenance of Nebula Graph clusters on Kubernetes. Building upon the excellent scalability mechanism of Kubernetes, Nebula Graph introduced its operation and maintenance knowledge into the Kubernetes system, which makes Nebula Graph a real cloud-native graph database.

How it works¶

For resource types that do not exist within Kubernetes，you can register them by adding custom API objects. The common way is to use the CustomResourceDefinition.

Nebula Operator abstracts the deployment management of Nebula Graph clusters as a CRD. By combining multiple built-in API objects including StatefulSet, Service, and ConfigMap, the routine management and maintenance of a Nebula Graph cluster are coded as a control loop in the Kubernetes system. When a CR instance is submitted, Nebula Operator drives database clusters to the final state according to the control process.

Features of Nebula Operator¶

The following features are already available in Nebula Operator:

• Deploy and uninstall clusters: Nebula Operator simplifies the process of deploying and uninstalling clusters for users. Nebula Operator allows you to quickly create, update, or delete a Nebula Graph cluster by simply providing the corresponding CR file. For more information, see Deploy Nebula Graph Clusters with Kubectl or Deploy Nebula Graph Clusters with Helm.

• Scale clusters: Nebula Operator calls Nebula Graph's native scaling interfaces in a control loop to implement the scaling logic. You can simply perform scaling operations with YAML configurations and ensure the stability of data. For more information, see Scale clusters with Kubectl or Scale clusters with Helm.

• Cluster Upgrade: Nebula Operator supports cluster upgrading from version 2.5.x to version 2.6.x.

• Self-Healing: Nebula Operator calls interfaces provided by Nebula Graph clusters to dynamically sense cluster service status. Once an exception is detected, Nebula Operator performs fault tolerance. For more information, see Self-Healing.

• Balance Scheduling: Based on the scheduler extension interface, the scheduler provided by Nebula Operator evenly distributes Pods in a Nebula Graph cluster across all nodes.

Limitations¶

Version limitations¶

Nebula Operator does not support the v1.x version of Nebula Graph. Nebula Operator version and the corresponding Nebula Graph version are as follows:

Feature limitations¶

Nebula Operator currently only supports manual scaling of Nebula Graph clusters, and does not support automatic scaling of Nebula Graph clusters.