Feature Overview

• The existing OLM concepts and on-disk formats around catalogs, packages and channels are to be used as a basis for OLM 1.0 and its new set of APIs.

Goals

• Users of OLM 1.0 can leverage the existing catalog images that ship with OpenShift since 4.9 or newer (in the FBC format).
• Users of OLM 1.0 can enable OLM 1.0 APIs and create API object(s) in parallel with the 0.x APIs on the same cluster with the same catalog image.
• Users of OLM 1.0 do not have to rebuild their existing catalogs into a new format, if they are already using the FBC format.
• Users of OLM 1.0 do not have to re-learn OLM core packaging concepts. Operators still ship in a history of versions inside a channel, a collection of channel is known as a package.

Requirements

• OLM 1.0 APIs are going to be cluster-scoped. As such we need to bridge the current namespace-scoped catalog model.

Use Cases

Main Use Case:

• OLM 1.0 users can leverage the OpenShift default catalogs with the new APIs with easy configurations
• OLM 1.0 users can still select from a range of available packages, release channels and versions to install that come from a catalog image that ships in the FBC format

Alternative Use Case:

• OLM 1.0 users can re-use their existing custom catalogs but may have to reference them in the cluster with another, cluster-scoped API

Definition of Done / Acceptance criteria

• all use cases discussed above are implemented
• the existing weighting of catalogs remains available
• the existing scoping of an installation request to a particular catalog remains available

Background, and strategic fit

This is part of a larger effort to re-design vital parts of the OLM APIs and conceptual models to fit the use case of OLM in managed service environments, GitOps-controlled infrastructure and restrictive self-managed deployments in Enterprise environments. You can learn more about it here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LX4dJMbSmuIMn98tCiBaONmTunWR6zdUJuH-8uZ8Cno/edit?usp=sharing

Documentation Considerations

• the way OLM 1.0 refers to existing FBC-formatted catalog images needs to be documented.
  • 3 YAML samples in the doc:
    • Catalog YAML references Red Hat catalog
    • Catalog YAML references Certified catalog
    • Catalog YAML reference Community catalog
• users need to understand how catalog references are managed on the cluster when the operator management happens at the cluster scope

• users need to understand how OLM 1.0 resolves installation

• we expect some customers to use this feature to bring custom operators to the cluster