Currenly, the acceptance testing jobs build a custom test image in which they are executed. The acceptance tests are running in the local mode which means that couple of tools such as Go, operator-sdk and others are needed to build the operator binary locally.

Since PR#973 has been merged it is now possible and required to run acceptance tests on OpenShift with SBO installed in the cluster the test image only needs to be able to run the acceptance tests in the remote mode which requires only small number of tools like Python and make.

The custom test image is based on centos:7 (served by docker.io registry) and installs bunch of tools and CLIs that are likely no longer needed (as mentined above).

Additionally, the fact that the base image is served by docker.io registry causes a rate limit to be exceeded couple of times a month which makes the PR checks for running the acceptance tests on OpenShift flaky and ultimately temporarily blocks the PRs from being merged.

The point of this story is to investigate alternatives to the centos:7 base image to use something that wouldn't cause rate limits to be exceeded and to simplify the test image and the OpenShift CI job to only do and have only what is needed.