Networking parters are building integrations for alternative network controller integrations which do not make use of OVN as a network controller, may not make use of ML2-OVN as a network plugin, and may require different additional agents on EDPM hosts. The current in-place update process assumes that OVN is being used and has a wait until OVN has been deployed to the data plane before it kicks off the control plane updates. For these networking partners, this will never happen and therefore the update process will stall forever.

The openstack-operator update process needs to cater for alternative network providers so that if OVN is not being used, it continues the update process without waiting for OVN to be deployed to the data plane.