Epic Goal

Take OTA-253's tech-preview preflight functionality GA.

Why is this important?

Tech-preview is a useful place to test functionality and collect feedback. But to actually deliver value to production clusters, the feature needs to be generally available. See OTA-253 for additional details on the value being delivered.

Scenarios

Component maintainer who notices that development branch work introduces compatibility constraints

They should be able to easily add logic to the development branch to detect incompatible configuration in 4.(y-1) clusters.

Cluster admin running 4.(y-1) and curious about their compatibility with 4.y or 4.(y+1)

They should be able to easily run low-impact preflight checks from the target payload and get a compatibility report.

Dependencies (internal and external)

API-review approval of openshift/api feature-gate promotion.

Contributing Teams and contacts

• Development - OTA, API-review
• Documentation - OTA
• QE - OTA
• PX - OTA
• Others -

Acceptance Criteria

A cluster-admin can request a preflight check of their generally-available cluster vs. the next minor release, and receive a report with blocking concerns and actionable steps to take to unblock those concerns. A cluster with manual mode cloud credentials no longer needs a manual compatibility audit, instead that check is automated, and the cluster-admin is only warned when they actually need changes.

Drawbacks or Risk

The current Upgradeable and conditional-update PromQL checks are evaluated continuously, to give cluster admins early feedback, so they have time to address any concerns, and are less likely to be surprised by a new concern on the day they'd been hoping to update. The initial preflight work will be on-demand, and cluster admins that do not request an early preflight may not get the same early warning that Upgradeable currently delivers. But cluster admins who want early warning will be able to request an early preflight, and future work could consider a way to schedule automatic prechecks vs. the longest hop available in the current channel, both of which mitigate this user-experience risk.

Done - Checklist

The following points apply to all epics and are what the OpenShift team believes are the minimum set of criteria that epics should meet for us to consider them potentially shippable. We request that epic owners modify this list to reflect the work to be completed in order to produce something that is potentially shippable.

• CI Testing - Tests are merged and completing successfully
• Documentation - Content development is complete.
• QE - Test scenarios are written and executed successfully.
• Technical Enablement - Slides are complete (if requested by PLM)
• Other