Nature of request and details:

The AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) are a community project started by AWS to allow developers to access AWS services directly from Kubernetes.

ACK is mostly installed using Helm and some AWS pre-config steps. Red Hat engineers have been working with AWS engineers upstream to bundle the controller installation process into an operator via OLM.

However at the moment this Operator is a community effort and not supported by Red Hat.

This RFE seeks to change support and efforts to support the operator fully.

Customer needs:

ACK allows AWS-based OCP installs (managed or self-managed) to easily access the massive AWS ecosystem of services via a Kubernetes construct (ACK provides a CRD and controller for each AWS service). This makes OCP an appealing Kubernetes "engine" in AWS and enhances its value alongside all the AWS services.

We'd also like to make ACK a bigger part of OCP by utilising the Service Binding Operator. This will require ACK to comply with the service binding spec (https://github.com/servicebinding/spec) which is currently does not. This would allow developers to more easily connect to back end AWS resources by providing their credentials via SBO without administrators assisting. By making the ACK operator a supported service we feel it will allow us to better work with AWS to suggest these changes. 

Additionally ACK is used in RHODA and may be used in other layered offerings so its support for those will be valuable.

Being able to install ACK as an operator is a key difference for OCP over EKS and other K8s and a necessity to allow us to compete with EKS and ACK via Helm.