Currently, PeerPods reads the peer-pods-secret across all providers to parse cloud credentials and request resources from the cloud.

During installation, our operator attempts to use the Cloud Credential Operator (CCO) if the peer-pods-secret is empty. This behavior is consistent across all providers. Since CCO is enabled by default in most installations, this improves the overall user experience by reducing manual steps.

While this is not a hard dependency, users can still inject credentials manually, the documentation should clarify this "soft dependency." Specifically, sections that mention peer-pods-secret as optional should highlight that if CCO is not installed and no secret is provided, PeerPods will fail to operate.

This is valid since OSC 1.6.

Update (Avital): IBM requires peer pod secret. Confirmed by Ajay Victor in this comment.