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 guide for OSSM 3 that can be given to 3rd parties to run as a "smoke test" of OSSM 3 against their OpenShift cluster environment with the 3rd party CNI configure. This could also be used by other 3rd parties to validate OSSM in their environment.

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).

Acceptance Criteria:

• A documented procedure that a 3rd party (a non-Red Hat employee) could use to execute a "smoke test" of test cases against an OCP cluster with OSSM deployed. The "smoke tests" should be enough to validate that OSSM's core functions are working. It does not need to include advanced use cases like multi-cluster. It also does not need to include integrations like metrics, distributed tracing or cert-manager. If possible, it should also avoid potentially flaky tests.
• Include how to find and read the result (e.g. What does a pass look like, what do failures look like)
• This can be published as part of the openshift-service-mesh docs (or developer docs if it would be useful for OSSM devs). This will NOT be added to product doc.