For Private Preview, when customers upgrade the Control Plane of their ROSA HCP clusters, this will cause all Nodes in the data plane of their Cluster  managed by Karpenter to also be upgraded. The Control Plane upgrade does not block on the completion of the data plane upgrade.

This is a departure from the current behaviour of Control Plane upgrades in ROSA HCP: They do not have any impact on the data plane Nodes that are hosting customer workloads.

This coupling of Control Plane and Data Plane Node upgrades poses a challenge in the context of our Managed Services. There are circumstances under which we need to enforce a Control Plane upgrade e.g. OCP Version EOL or CVE remediation. Currently this can be done without impacting customer workloads as the data plane is not upgraded. By coupling the Control Plane and Data Plane upgrades in AutoNode, we are in a position that forced Control Plane upgrades may impact running customer workloads.

We need to decide the strategy for this for GA. Options include:

• Stick with the existing behaviour and document it as part of AutoNode
• Provide a mechanism for customers to "opt-in" or define when the data plane nodes upgrade
• Provide customers with an additional mechanism to update their AutoNode managed Nodepools independently of the Control Plane upgrade.

Acceptance Criteria

• The customer experience of control plane and data plane upgrades when using AutoNode are defined for GA
• The implementation is available to customers in production
• Documentation reflects how customers upgrade the Control Plane and Data Plane of their cluster, in particular Nodes managed via AutoNode.