Introducing Oracle Kubernetes Engine support, stronger TLS, and a lighter dependency footprint
ScyllaDB Operator 1.21.0 is now available.
For background, ScyllaDB Operator is an open-source project that helps you run ScyllaDB on Kubernetes. It lets you manage ScyllaDB clusters deployed to Kubernetes and automate tasks related to operating a ScyllaDB cluster (e.g., installation, vertical and horizontal scaling, as well as rolling upgrades).
ScyllaDB Operator 1.21 expands cloud platform support with OKE, adds ECDSA as an alternative key type for TLS certificates, and removes a hard dependency on Prometheus Operator.
Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE) support
ScyllaDB Operator 1.21 adds Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) as a supported platform.
The new OKE support comes with comprehensive documentation covering the entire workflow , from provisioning the underlying OCI infrastructure (VCN, subnets, gateways, and node pools with Dense I/O shapes and local NVMe storage) to deploying a 3-node ScyllaDB cluster spread across fault domains. An automated setup script is also provided for one-command infrastructure provisioning.
To get started with ScyllaDB on OKE, see the Set up an OKE cluster for ScyllaDB infrastructure guide and the OKE reference deployment.
ECDSA support for TLS certificates
ScyllaDB Operator manages TLS certificates internally for securing client-to-node communication. Until now, only RSA keys were supported for certificate generation. ScyllaDB Operator 1.21 adds elliptic curve cryptography (ECDSA) as an alternative key type. This allows smaller key sizes and faster cryptographic operations with strong security.
You can opt in to ECDSA by setting the –crypto-key-type=ECDSA flag on the operator, with the curve bit-size configurable via –crypto-ecdsa-key-size (defaulting to P-384). RSA remains the default key type. The RSA key size is now configured with a dedicated –crypto-rsa-key-size flag; the previous –crypto-key-size flag is deprecated and remains accepted as an alias.
Prometheus Operator is now an optional dependency
Previously, ScyllaDB Operator required Prometheus Operator CRDs (monitoring.coreos.com/v1) to be installed in the cluster, even if you did not intend to use ScyllaDBMonitoring. Missing CRDs would result in error logs at startup.
With ScyllaDB Operator 1.21, Prometheus Operator becomes a purely optional dependency. The operator auto-detects whether the CRDs are present at startup using Kubernetes API discovery. When they are absent, the ScyllaDBMonitoring controller is not started and no error logs are emitted. If you install Prometheus Operator after the ScyllaDB Operator is already running, restart the operator to pick up the new CRDs.
Refer to the monitoring setup guide for details.

