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Apache Superset Kubernetes Operator

Note: The API is still v1alpha1 — CRD schemas and behavior may change between releases until it stabilizes.

Run Apache Superset on Kubernetes from a single custom resource. Define one Superset object and the operator reconciles everything that stands behind a working Superset — Deployments, Services, ConfigMaps, lifecycle Jobs, and the supporting resources — keeping migrations, configuration, scaling, and networking in sync as your spec changes.

Read the documentation to get started, or jump straight to the quick start.

Highlights

One resource, full lifecycle — a single Superset CR drives database migrations, secret-key rotation, config rendering, and component rollout.
Safe upgrades — components drain, lifecycle tasks run, and traffic returns only once the new version is healthy, with an optional maintenance page for the window.
Batteries included, never locked in — tuned defaults and presets for Gunicorn, Celery, the metastore, and Valkey, with a raw Python escape hatch for anything not surfaced as a typed field.
Production operations built in — autoscaling, PodDisruptionBudgets, NetworkPolicies, Gateway API / Ingress routing, and a Prometheus ServiceMonitor.
Fits your cluster — cluster-scoped or namespace-scoped installs; the namespace-scoped Helm install renders no manager ClusterRole (CRD installation and, unless disabled, secure metrics auth still need cluster-scoped RBAC — see installation).

→ See the full feature overview in the docs.

Supported Kubernetes versions

Officially tested: Kubernetes 1.36, 1.35

Official support covers the two most recent Kubernetes minor versions with a published kind node image. The newest Kubernetes release gets best-effort coverage via a non-blocking CI lane until kind ships its node image.

Older releases are likely to work but are not tested. The practical minimum is Kubernetes 1.25: the operator‘s CRD validation is implemented entirely with CEL validation rules, which are enabled by default as beta from 1.25 and graduated to GA in 1.29. On clusters older than 1.25 the CRD still installs, but these rules are silently ignored — meaning the operator’s secret-handling and configuration-safety checks are not enforced. Horizontal Pod Autoscaling additionally requires the autoscaling/v2 API (Kubernetes 1.23+).

Quick Start

Install the operator via Helm:

helm install superset-operator \
  oci://ghcr.io/apache/superset-kubernetes-operator/charts/superset-operator \
  --version <version> \
  --namespace superset-operator-system \
  --create-namespace

Then create a minimal Superset instance:

apiVersion: superset.apache.org/v1alpha1
kind: Superset
metadata:
  name: my-superset
spec:
  image:
    tag: "latest"
  environment: Development
  secretKey: thisIsNotSecure_changeInProduction!
  metastore:
    host: postgres
    port: 5432
    database: superset
    username: superset
    password: superset
  webServer: {}

Note: The example above uses environment: Development for simplicity. In production (the default), use secretKeyFrom and metastore.passwordFrom to reference Kubernetes Secrets. See the User Guide and the sample manifests for production examples.

Under the hood

For the plumbing-curious:

Language & framework — written in Go, scaffolded with the Operator SDK and built on controller-runtime. Validation is CEL-based on the CRD — no admission webhooks to operate.
Kubernetes APIs — tracks the current k8s.io client libraries and Gateway API; exact pinned versions live in go.mod.
Image & supply chain — distroless, multi-architecture (amd64/arm64) container; releases are Cosign-signed; dependencies are kept current via Renovate with a minimum release age.
Design & internals — a single public CRD reconciled into parent-owned resources. See the architecture overview and the security & supply-chain notes.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Development setup, the full list of make commands, the testing philosophy, and the code-generation workflow live in the contributing guide. After editing type definitions in api/v1alpha1/, run make codegen and commit the generated files alongside your changes.

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE for details.