Feature Overview

Provide customers with a more centralized and unified experience throughout the lifecycle of their installed cluster extensions (such as "Operators," "layered products," or "add-ons"). Currently, customers must consult individual product documentation to find basic information necessary for decision-making regarding extension updates: support status, lifecycle duration, update paths, and potential disruptive changes.

The operator upgrade planner combines visual interfaces and additional metadata to enhance customers' situational awareness of their extension support status, available upgrade options, necessary updates within a platform update, change previews, and the ability to run preflight checks—all accessible from a single entry point, starting within the cluster console and later integrated into ACM.

Goals

• Prevent customers from running unsupported extension products
• Enable customers to plan and coordinate operator and platform upgrades within a single maintenance window on the current platform version
• Support adoption of recommended platform and extension version combinations, especially during platform upgrades
• Build confidence in update success through preflight checks and detailed progress updates

Requirements - Phase 1:

A centralized lifecycle management view providing a high-level summary of the entire platform's support status, aggregated from all installed components

This view must track all installed extensions and report for each:

• current support status and lifecycle stage
• remaining time in the current lifecycle phase
• platform compatibility
• current update policy (manual, semi-automatic, fully automatic)
• current update channel
• update availability, including multiple target versions
• release notes
• change previews and compatibility assessments for available updates

All information should be accessible via APIs for use in Cluster Console, CLIs, and ACM.

Use Cases:

• A platform engineer reviews the list of installed extensions to determine if any installed operator is End-Of-Life
• A platform engineer plans the next maintenance window by reviewing remaining lifecycle times for all extensions
• A platform engineer is notified of an available update for an installed extension and considers different target versions or update paths (patch updates in the current version line, or switching to different new version lines)
• A platform engineer assesses potential impacts of an extension upgrade by reviewing compatibility assessments based on the selected target version

Out of Scope

For now: Helm

Background

Read the full proposal here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MzGGov5slwnEmohoW4ZSVvhxSiaBXRlWjSzoO3affMY/edit?tab=t.mepx4xanj5dv 

Interoperability Considerations

This experience must be available without degradation in disconnected environments lacking direct internet access and AI capabilities.