OpenShift is a highly pluggable platform, and customers may choose to use 3rd party CNIs (Non OVN/SDN) with OpenShift and service mesh. The responsibility of ensuring that OpenShift (and Service Mesh, etc) works with the 3rd party CNI lies with the vendor supporting that CNI (e.g. Tigera for Calico, Isovalent for Cillium etc) and NOT the OSSM team.

BUT, we do need to provide tools/guidance for the 3rd party vendor to test OpenShift Service Mesh with their OpenShift configuration.

For OpenShift Service Mesh 2, we tell these vendors to run the Maistra test tool.

We need an equivalent of the above Maistra test tool guide for OSSM 3 that can be given to 3rd parties to run as a "smoke test" of OSSM against their OpenShift cluster environment with the 3rd party CNI configure.

This should reuse as much of our existing regression test suites as possible to ensure we maintain the suite across releases. We do not want to build or maintain tests specific to 3rd party conformance testing.

Currently certified CNIs are listed here: https://access.redhat.com/articles/5436171?extIdCarryOver=true&sc_cid=7015Y0000048J1wQAE

Note: The doc updates for this are not part of OpenShift docs, but rather: https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_software_certification/2024/html/red_hat_software_certification_workflow_guide/con_cni-certification_openshift-sw-cert-workflow-working-with-cloud-native-network-function#running-the-cni-tests_openshift-sw-cert-workflow-working-with-container-network-interface

As noted in the team call on Nov 14th, Multus may be the primary determining factor for OSSM on 3rd party CNIs. If they do not use Multus, they will have to enable CNI chaining, which is not yet enabled by default in OSSM 3:

• By default, we use Multus for IstioCni configuration. If already using Multus, it should work out of the box. If not, may have to disable Multus in Istio resource (enabled by default w/ OpenShift profile applied automatically).