Draft guidelines on how substantial an operator has to be to become an independant project

[jberkus]

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CNCF is starting to get a lot of Operators submitted as projects in the Sandbox queue. We do have some operators as projects, most notably Strimzi and Rook. However, it is also clear that some operators should instead be subprojects of the software they are operators for, rather than their own projects.

Drafting guidelines for how to make this decision would save time for evaluating the Sandbox queue.

@TheFoxAtWork

[TheFoxAtWork]

Thank you @jberkus for filing this issue.

I think one of the core items the TOC discussed on the most recent sandbox call and in previous discussions breaks this problem into a few different components:

• When should a operator be a core integration/offering a project?
• Should an operator, to exist as a standalone project, include other capabilities, such as exporters, controllers, plugins, hooks that provide adopters a "solution" to a problem set?

[raravena80]

Related: https://github.com/cncf/sandbox/issues/49

[TheFoxAtWork]

Assigning this to myself to draft language on this later.