Pulsar Helm Chart vs Pulsar-Operator Helm Chart

[bradenwright]

I found charts for:

• https://github.com/streamnative/charts/tree/master/charts/pulsar
• https://github.com/streamnative/charts/tree/master/charts/pulsar-operator

and I'm curious the differences, is there a good reason to use the operator? Typically I think of using Operators to add some kind of business operations to the chart. Things that don't fit eventual consistency. Right now we've been evaluating the public chart https://pulsar.apache.org/docs/en/helm-overview/ but want to make sure I'm using the best helm chart for Pulsar.

Simplicity is a key factor since this will be deployed to lots of clients/k8s clusters

[sijie]

@bradenwright

The charts/pulsar is actually the same chart as the open-source chart. We actually contributed our chart to the Pulsar community. You can use either chart. They both work well.

The charts/pulsar-operator is the chart for installing Pulsar operators. Helm is great. But Helm templates are not the best tool to manage a stateful workload. Helm did not provide important features for running a stateful data service such as the ability to control deployment sequences and add additional operations between deployment steps. As a result, we developed the operators to provide Customer Resource Definitions and Controllers to manage and run Pulsar clusters in a more resilient way. You can read more from this blog post and you can watch a presentation from one of our engineers (@fantapsody) in Pulsar Summit North America 2021 - "Manage Pulsar Cluster Lifecycles with Kubernetes Operators".

Operators will definitely simplify a lot of managing and running Pulsar clusters on Kubernetes.

[Kiddinglife]

Hey @sijie, I did not see any configs related to k8s hpa configures in the operator example eg. minReplicas & maxRepilcas. Does that mean hap is Not supported by pulsar operator? Thank you.

[sijie]

@Kiddinglife - It is under development and coming in the next release.

[rayliu419]

Hi @sijie ,

" Helm did not provide important features for running a stateful data service such as the ability to control deployment sequences and add additional operations between deployment steps. " There is a helm operator here : https://github.com/apache/pulsar-helm-chart Seems this operator implement control deployment sequences ? Based on my knowledge of pulsar, pulsar needs to setup zookeeper at first, if helm can't support deployment sequences, how does the above operator do ?

[ericsyh]

Close legacy issues in charts. Pls feel free to reopen the issue if this problem still exists in current version.