Expand OpenShift lifecycle to 36 months for multi-arch (ARM, Z, and Power)

BU Priority Overview

As part of OpenShift Lifecycle expansion under HATSTRAT-202  we are making available a third year of lifecycle for the OpenShift.Expand OpenShift lifecycle for ARM, Z, and Power to 36 months by adding a 12 month Extended Update Support (EUS) phase.This is only on EUS (even minor) versions.

Goals

Provide an equivalent lifecycle for customers consuming OpenShift on ARM, Z, and Power to that offered in x86. Both in homogeneous and heterogeneous clusters.

State of the Business

OpenShift on IBM Power and IBM zSystems is a small, but growing, area of OpenShift adoption that is important to many key customers as well as our multi-architecture strategy. They have been classed for some time now as "first class" architectures which sets expectations around not only features and releases but also support. When you add in Arm support, a key initiative for Red Hat, aligning lifecycles become very important to adoption, otherwise the architectures will be seen (and treated) as second class citizens. With the addition of support for mixed architecture clusters this alignment becomes even more important as if it differs by architecture the customers could find themselves in the situation where part of their cluster is supported and part isn't. 

Execution Plans

Plan to add EUS phase on ARM, Z, and Power in 4.14, 4.16, 4.18 and so on.
EUS channels will be the only channels which receive z-stream updates after 18 months.

 8 months Full Support
10 months Maintenance Support
 6 months EUS
12 months paid Support

Acceptance criteria

• OCP 4.14+ EUS (even minor) lifecycle of 36 months includes ARM, Z, Power (in addition to x86) 
• https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/openshift updated