Confluent Operator facilitates the deployment and management of the Confluent Platform as a cloud-native, stateful container application on Kubernetes and OpenShift, simplifying the process of operating Apache Kafka® clusters. By leveraging Kubernetes automation, OpenShift Container Platform (OCP), and Helm, it offers benefits like cloud portability, self-healing capabilities, and easy scalability, while maintaining user control over components. OCP, a platform-as-a-service built around Docker and Kubernetes on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, can be deployed on-premises or in public clouds, although it requires managing certain responsibilities like securing Kubernetes nodes. The setup process involves deploying OCP, followed by the Confluent Operator and its components, with the necessity of cloud provider accounts, Red Hat network access, and familiarity with OCP SDK. Deploying Kafka on Kubernetes via Confluent Operator provides native integration with Prometheus and Grafana for metrics visualization, and the use of StatefulSets for Kafka brokers and other components ensures self-healing capabilities, enhancing the reliability and efficiency of cloud-native deployments.