There's some truth and some wistful hope in your post; In my time at Google, the only thing that was anything like these "Operators" was what was developed by the MySQL SRE team, which was great but they also admitted it was a bit "round peg, square hole". There's a shared persistence layer that hasn't quite shown up yet; you need a low-latency POSIX filesystem and a throughput-heavy non-POSIX system (Chubby and GFS in the Borg world/Etcd and ??? in k8s). Not having the ability to work with persistent, shared objects is the biggest detriment to the ecosystem. S3 sorta works if you're in AWS, GCE supports Bigtable and etc
