What

There is no method for installing only the components of RHCL that you need to solve your use case. It is an all or nothing setup even though the components that make up RHCL are modular and independent.

RHCL is growing in scope and components  (MCP Gateway, Extensions) and the method it uses to install its components is changing (OLM Dependencies). Installing all components every time is increasing the foot print, admin overhead and deployment considerations and is no longer an ideal way to ship nor will we be able to use the existing method in the future.

Why

Most of the components used in RHCL have their own operators. Currently in order to deploy these components, the RHCL "core" operator declares an OLM dependency on each of these operators. This means that when you install the RHCL operator, you get all the component operators installed by default whether you want them or not. This method of installation is going away in OLM so we need to make a change around installation. 

We have often discussed making RHCL more modular to install based on the use cases we see from users ( MCP Gateway only requires AuthPolicy, AI Gateway only requires AuthPolicy and TokenRateLimitPolicy), we also anticipate customers will not always want all components depending on their use cases (Example they want to use DNSPolicy but have no interest in Auth and RLP) etc and so don't want these APIs and surface area.