As an admin, I need to deploy clusters with operators in one shot (All in day 1). Some Assisted Service Operator plugins have manifests that must be applied in the post installation stage, thus, as an admin, I need post installation Operator plugin manifests to be applied in agent based installation.

Currently, the assisted-installer-controller job takes care of finalizing the operator plugins additional config by downloading a custom_manifest.json file from the Assisted Service. This does not work in agent based installation since the AS (Assisted Service) is already gone with the node0 reboot by the time the assisted-installer-controller job runs, resulting in the post-installation Operator plugin manifests not being applied.

Proposal

Adding an offline mode to assisted-installer-controller so that it can perform the Agent based installation tasks it needs to without the presence of the AS.

One possible way could be to ship the custom_manifest.json in a ConfigMap, and let the assisted-controller job use it if AS is not available.
See https://github.com/openshift/assisted-installer/blob/1d74d0ee76d08eec761d5a4d8693d1df0a96268c/src/assisted_installer_controller/assisted_installer_controller.go#L418