Platform & DevOps·The orchestrator's model of the world
the failover, the backup and the version upgrade for the database are performed by software encoding what the DBA used to do.
Operator
Also calledKubernetes operator, operator pattern
A custom controller that manages a stateful application, encoding the operational knowledge for it — how to bootstrap, back up, scale, and upgrade safely — as a reconciliation loop. It exists because generic orchestration handles stateless workloads well and stateful ones badly. The trade is real: you swap a runbook a human follows for software that will act at 3am, and now the quality of that operator is your database's reliability.