Thanks for pointing out the Operator framework. Please correct me if I am wrong, but Operator is not a Kubernetes thing - its a custom functionality built by coreos. It is undoubtedly awesome, but it is very hard to get it working on non coreos distro.

I personally believe that orchestration primitives like operators, linkerd, ingress, etc are what the k8s project should focus on. Im actually unsure if StatefulSets are solving production problems for anybody.

IMHO they are a fairly Googley concept and hard to apply outside of Google for anybody (without solving the networked filesystem problem first).