Feature Overview  

Introduce a way to showcase, display, and catalog a series of prebuilt OS images for Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS) that provide additional capabilities for OpenShift customers who have very specific operational requirements. Customers can then select which OS image they would like to use. This could be built on top of the foundations of OCPSTRAT-2567.

Background

RHCOS has expanded in both size, scope, and complexity in order to accommodate a wide range of operational contexts and situations, ranging from a single-node instance all the way to hundreds of nodes. While the standard RHCOS image covers most of the general use-cases, customers have long-sought the ability to customize their OS images. While OpenShift supports this, customers do so with the understanding that doing so takes them off of the paved road, meaning that these custom OS images are additional complexity that they must own and manage.

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Having a catalog of prebuilt images would address the needs of customers who:

• Have specialty hardware such as GPUs
• Prefer to not want to deal with the complexities of building and maintaining an OS image
• Have specific requirements such security requirements with easily-obtained software bill of materials (SBOM) and attestation and would prefer not to have to manage that process
• Customers who provide managed control planes such as Hypershift, might wish to offer customized OS images to their cluster tenants

Requirements / potential capabilities

• Customers can use an off-the-shelf (OTS) OS image that is built, tested, and maintained by Red Hat and/or Red Hat’s partners
• Select and deploy an OTS OS image at any time including Day 0
• Be able to roll back to the “factory” OS image that their cluster had before
• If an OTS image still does not quite meet the customers' requirements, they can use it as the base image for further customizations
• Customers can maintain their own instance of the catalog and their own images; if they choose to