This product top-level epic is to ensure that customers are clear on OSSM 3 operator and component versioning and that there is a documented and tested procedure to perform both minor and patch upgrades.

This includes:

• Operator vs component versioning tables
• Operator channel strategy so that users are clear which channel they should be using (see design doc)
• Minor version upgrade procedures (e.g. 3.0 -> 3.1): in place, canary, manual/automatic. 
• patch upgrades procedures (e.g. 3.0.0 -> 3.0.1). *For patch upgrades, it is important that an automatic upgrade is supported, and likely default (similar to OSSM 2 behaviour).

Artifacts: 

• Upstream sail-operator epic on automatic upgrades: https://github.com/istio-ecosystem/sail-operator/issues/74 (Depends on "Tags" feature)
• OSSM 3 Operator Versioning Terms and Update
• OSSM 3 operator Versioning, support matrix, channels (older doc)
• Doc issue: https://issues.redhat.com/browse/OSSM-8218

Note 1: We have obligations as a tier 2 (and future tier 1) operator noted, particularly with regard to channel names. This is documented here.

Note 2: This issue does not cover OSSM 2 -> 3 upgrades, but upgrades from 3.0.0 onward.