Feature Overview

Hosted Control Planes (HCP) support for self-managed OpenShift on Azure introduces a cloud-native architecture where control plane components run as pods within a centralized management cluster, eliminating the need for dedicated Azure VMs for master nodes.

This implementation leverages Red Hat's HyperShift framework via the Multi-Cluster Engine (MCE) operator, allowing very fast cluster provisioning

Goals

• Azure-native integration: Control planes operate within customer-managed Azure subscriptions, with worker nodes (NodePools) provisioned as Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets for dynamic scaling
• Credential isolation: Azure service principals are scoped per cluster, preventing cross-cluster credential leakage.
• Hybrid cloud flexibility: Management clusters can span Azure Availability Zones or integrate with on-premises infrastructure.
• Centralized Observability: Unified observability across Azure-hosted clusters through OpenShift's built-in monitoring stack.

Acceptance Criteria for Tech Preview

• Storage support and storage dedicated to etcd
• Multi-zone deployment
• External DNS
• Multi-Arch support (ARM Azure VMs)
• Autoscaler with attributes support
• Destroy cluster support
• KMS Support