Topology Operator and Engine Operator Feature Differences

Enhanced Installation and Upgrade

In the Topology Operator method of MATRIXX Engine management, custom resources (CRs) and operator pods manage the installation or upgrade of multiple sub-domains and engines across Kubernetes clusters, including the loading of pricing and taxation data. The helm upgrade command creates a pre-update instance that scales all topology-operator, subdomain-operator, pricing-operator, and engine-operator deployments to zero replicas, then back up to one replica. This ensures that only updated operators handle the upgrade. Topology Operator compares the current MtxSubdomain CRs in the cluster with the target MtxSubdomain CRs based on the MtxTopology CR. The topology-operator then updates all MtxSubdomain CRs as necessary.

Accelerated Engine Start

In Topology Operator-based installations, start-up tasks such as configuration and pod state checks are performed in parallel for the engine and engine-level Traffic Routing Agents (TRA-PROCs and TRA-PUBs). The engine-starter job also creates checkpoints before cold restart of the engine if a checkpoint pod is running. These enhancements improve engine start-up performance.

Multi-Tenancy

In Topology Operator-based installations, Tenants (MVNOs) can create, modify, and manage their own pricing without impacting other tenants. Many tenants can share a single sub-domain, with each tenant having a separate catalog.

Event Repository Purge Utility

Topology Operator includes configuration options for the event_repository_purge application so that it can be configured and updated with the rest of the installation.

Health Checking

Topology Operator-based installations include the following configurable health checks:

• Cluster monitoring and recovery.
• Engine chain checking and recovery.
• Inter-site connectivity monitoring.
• Processing and publishing cluster synchronization monitoring and recovery.
• System monitoring.

HTTP/2 Support

Topology Operator-based installations support HTTP/2 as a wrapper protocol in TRA virtual servers (VSs) for incoming MDC messages. This allows greater interoperability with other components that support HTTP/2. On the protocol level, each request or response MDC message is contained within a single HTTP message.

Pricing and Taxation Loading

Topology Operator-based installations include a pricing-operator pod that handles the loading of new pricing data by creating pricing-loader instances. Similarly, a tax-operator pod handles loading of taxation data by creating tax-loader instances.