The container orchestration space has standardized around Kubernetes, with companies like Mirantis, D2iQ, Red Hat, and Pivotal adopting it as a managed service by major cloud providers. This standardization is poised to solve some of the industry's biggest challenges in managing distributed systems, particularly in terms of availability, consistent presentation of data, efficient use of resources, performance characteristics, and scalability. However, operating these complex systems can be challenging due to the need for experts to manage various low-level operations such as configuring and running systems, scaling processes horizontally, restarting clusters, patching machines, upgrading software, reconfiguring, backing up, restoring, and other Day 2 operations. Confluent thinks that everyone should be able to experience and leverage the value of Apache Kafka without needing to become an expert in these complex sequences of low-level operations, focusing instead on what needs to be true of a system to realize its greatest value. To achieve this, Confluent is bringing together the event streaming paradigm and the cloud-native data system paradigm through fully managed Apache Kafka as a service with Confluent Cloud and Confluent Operator for Kubernetes, which provides a cloud-native experience for self-hosted Confluent Platform. The Operator pattern on Kubernetes has become an industry standard, satisfying four key attributes: providing a consistent management experience across different tools, automating away common problems, delivering a runtime for distributed workloads and a framework for defining how to orchestrate specific data systems, and leveraging the power of Kubernetes with a rich ecosystem. By adopting Confluent Operator, users can focus on what needs to be true of a system rather than how to get it, and machines will intelligently and automatically figure out how to fulfill its purpose.