Operator Overview

layer-operator is the Kubernetes controller that owns hev layer’s declarative surface. The gateway handles the read and write path; the operator handles everything that wants to be expressed as desired state in the cluster: which indexes exist, how worker pools scale, and which stateless functions run against which indexes.

CRDs

The operator reconciles four resource kinds, each documented on its own page:

• Index CRD — one resource per Turbopuffer namespace the gateway should manage.
• InfraRules CRD — cluster-wide compute pools, document cache rules, and shared scaling policy.
• Pipeline CRD — staged work that changes row count.
• Function CRD — stateless user-defined functions that read and write attributes on an index.

Relationship to the gateway

The gateway is stateless about cluster topology. It reads CRD status from the operator to learn which indexes exist and which worker pools are ready, and it never writes to the cluster API directly. This split keeps the read/write path independent of reconciler latency — the gateway can keep serving even if the operator is restarted.