Architecture¶

OpenEverest is an open-source platform for automated database provisioning and management on Kubernetes. This page explains the key architectural decisions behind OpenEverest and describes its main components.

Kubernetes Operators¶

At the heart of OpenEverest is a deliberate bet on Kubernetes Operators as the primary building block for deploying and managing stateful workloads.

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A Kubernetes Operator is a software extension that uses custom resources to manage applications and their components. Operators encode operational knowledge — the same knowledge a human expert would use to deploy, configure, scale, and recover a specific piece of software.

Why Operators?¶

Unlike Helm charts, which excel at initial deployment, Operators provide full day-2 operational capabilities out of the box:

Scaling — horizontal and vertical, with proper coordination across cluster members
Backups and restores — scheduled or on-demand, with point-in-time recovery
Maintenance — rolling restarts, minor and major version upgrades
Self-healing — automatic recovery from pod failures and configuration drift

Beyond automation, database Operators carry built-in domain expertise. They don’t just start database pods in the right order — they also configure replication topologies, deploy read/write proxies and connection poolers, and tune engine-level settings based on the resources available. This expertise would otherwise require years of operational experience to develop in-house.

Main components¶

OpenEverest is composed of three main components that work together to give users a single pane of glass over their database fleet.

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OpenEverest Server¶

The OpenEverest Server is the control plane that users interact with directly. It exposes:

A web UI for managing database clusters, backups, monitoring endpoints, and access control.
A REST API for programmatic access to all OpenEverest capabilities.

OpenEverest Operator¶

The OpenEverest Operator acts as an operator of operators. When a user creates or modifies a database cluster through the UI or API, the OpenEverest Operator translates that intent into the native CustomResource object of the appropriate database operator. This abstraction layer means users work with a single, consistent API regardless of which database technology is running underneath.

Database Operators¶

Database Operators are Kubernetes Operators created by various open-source communities and vendors. They manage the lifecycle of a specific database engine — handling replication, failover, configuration, backups, and more according to each engine’s requirements.

OpenEverest is designed to be modular: new database technologies can be added by integrating a new Operator, without changes to the core platform. The currently supported engines are listed on the supported operators page.