The Operator currently requires users to have OLM installed in order to deploy the operator upstream. Despite being fundamental for Openshift, OLM is not universally popular upstream with users preferring to use Helm and/or raw yaml manifest files as part of their GitOps pipeline.

In order for users to deploy the Operator without OLM, it's necessary for them to download the source code and manually execute make deploy. If a user requires a specific release, they also need to checkout the associated tag.

We should provide static yaml descriptor files for every release that allow users to install a Cluster scoped Operator using kubectl apply. This will require users to have cert-manager installed in order for webhooks to work as expected, but this is a very popular Operator (CNCF graduated) so this should not be an issue.

For example, the Keycloak operator allows users to do:

# Install CRDs
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/keycloak/keycloak-k8s-resources/26.1.4/kubernetes/keycloaks.k8s.keycloak.org-v1.yml
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/keycloak/keycloak-k8s-resources/26.1.4/kubernetes/keycloakrealmimports.k8s.keycloak.org-v1.yml

# Deploy Operator
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/keycloak/keycloak-k8s-resources/26.1.4/kubernetes/kubernetes.yml

The current output of make deploy should be sufficient to allow the Operator to be deployed, so the main effort here is automating the generation and inclusion of these resources as part of the release process as well as adding smoke tests.