4.3. Managing catalogs

Cluster administrators can add catalogs, or curated collections of Operators and Kubernetes extensions, to their clusters. Operator authors publish their products to these catalogs. When you add a catalog to your cluster, you have access to the versions, patches, and over-the-air updates of the Operators and extensions that are published to the catalog.

You can manage catalogs and extensions declaratively from the CLI by using custom resources (CRs).

File-based catalogs are the latest iteration of the catalog format in Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM). It is a plain text-based (JSON or YAML) and declarative config evolution of the earlier SQLite database format, and it is fully backwards compatible.