Red Hat DevNation Tech Talk: The Kubernetes Operator pattern is rooted in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) automation principles[1], and SRE's key service metrics called "golden signals" provide the basic feedback stream for sophisticated, proactive controller logic in an Operator. Consider it a bug when your Operator's application requires human intervention. Operators are where you write code to fix those bugs and automate operations chores. The Operator maturity model is a way of thinking about iterative development of this kind of advanced automation on Kubernetes.