i haven’t tried it with opendistro yet, but for the future fork there’s already a discussion ongoing here about having support for an operator: Kubernetes operator support for the fork
this also contains some links to existing operators, some of which might work already now with opendistro.
we have also once played around a bit with ECK (you’ll have to make sure that the license is ok for your use-case!) where you can also create custom images and use these. however, the operator also wants to configure security things which obviously won’t work if you’re using the security module from opendistro instead of x-pack. and, once the fork has started, this operator will be fully incompatible (initially probably mainly due to the security module, later i could imagine that other things will also change), so investing in this right now doesn’t sound like a good idea.
for now, i have created a custom docker image which downloads the OSS version of ES plus some plugins and installs them. it also sets the permissions so that it’ll work for openshift (since it’s a PoC i’m probably giving too much permissions, i’ll have to re-iterate on this later) and i have set up a simple StatefulSet with a PersistentVolumeClaim (plus, of course, some NetworkPolicys, Services, etc.) to have it up & running. of course this can never compare to a real operator with all its features, thus i’m eagerly waiting for the operator of the fork 