Terms that have specific meanings in Aerospike, Kubernetes, and ACKO — or that are easily confused across these layers.
Operator & CRD Concepts
| Term | Definition |
|---|
| ACKO | Aeropike Community Edition Kubernetes Operator. Manages AerospikeCluster and AerospikeClusterTemplate resources via the acko.io API group. |
| AerospikeCluster | The primary Custom Resource (CRD Kind) representing an Aerospike CE cluster deployment. apiVersion: acko.io/v1alpha1. Short name: asc. |
| AerospikeClusterTemplate | A CRD providing reusable configuration profiles for clusters. Referenced by spec.templateRef. Short name: asct. |
| Rack | A logical failure domain within an Aerospike cluster. In ACKO, each rack maps to one StatefulSet and one ConfigMap (<clusterName>-<rackID> pattern). Rack IDs are user-assigned positive integers; ID 0 is reserved internally. |
| CR / Custom Resource | An instance of a CRD. For example, a specific AerospikeCluster object in a namespace is a CR. |
Aerospike vs. Kubernetes Term Disambiguation
| Term | In Aerospike | In Kubernetes |
|---|
| Node | A single Aerospike server process (asd daemon). In ACKO, one Aerospike node runs per Pod (1:1 mapping). | A worker machine (physical or virtual VM) in the K8s cluster. |
| Namespace | A data partition inside Aerospike — similar to a database. CE supports up to 2. Configured in spec.aerospikeConfig.namespaces. | An isolation boundary for K8s resources. The namespace where the CR lives. |
| Cluster | The set of Aerospike nodes that form a single distributed database. Represented by one AerospikeCluster CR. | The entire Kubernetes system (control plane + worker nodes). |
Pod & Restart Concepts
| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Pod | A Kubernetes Pod running exactly one Aerospike server container (aerospike-server), plus optional sidecars (e.g., Prometheus exporter). |
| Warm Restart | Sending SIGUSR1 to the asd process — restarts the server without losing in-memory data (CE 8.x+). Faster than a cold restart. |
| Cold Restart | Deleting and recreating the Pod. The Aerospike process starts fresh; in-memory data is lost. Required for pod spec changes. |
| Rolling Restart | The operator restarts pods one batch at a time (controlled by spec.rollingUpdateBatchSize) to maintain availability during config or image changes. |
Configuration Concepts
| Term | Definition |
|---|
| aerospikeConfig | The spec.aerospikeConfig field — a free-form map that maps directly to aerospike.conf. The operator converts it to Aerospike's text config format. |
| Dynamic Config Update | Applying config changes at runtime via Aerospike's set-config command, without restarting the pod. Enabled by spec.enableDynamicConfigUpdate: true. |
| Config Hash | A SHA-256 hash of the effective Aerospike configuration, stored as an annotation (acko.io/config-hash) on each Pod. The operator uses it to detect which pods need restarting. |
| PodSpec Hash | A SHA-256 hash of the Pod specification, stored as acko.io/podspec-hash. Changes trigger a cold restart (pod deletion + recreation). |
Common Abbreviations
| Abbreviation | Meaning |
|---|
asc | Short name for aerospikeclusters (kubectl alias) |
asct | Short name for aerospikeclustertemplates |
asd | Aerospike server daemon — the Aerospike database process |
asinfo | Aerospike info CLI tool for querying node state |
asadm | Aerospike admin CLI tool for management operations |
PDB | PodDisruptionBudget — K8s object limiting simultaneous pod disruptions |
PVC | PersistentVolumeClaim — K8s storage request |
ACL | Access Control List — Aerospike user/role permissions |