1. Proposed title of this feature request

Zero-Touch Provisioning (ZTP) Hub Cluster Operator for Faster Bootstrapping

2. What is the nature and description of the request?

Red Hat's Zero Touch (ZTP) Provisioning is a commercially supported deployment, configuration, and automation practice that helps to quickly deploy and operate large scale telco network deployments.  ZTP is the recommended and supported methodology for telco based deployments, to ensure that deployed Managed clusters are configured and tuned appropriately for telco workloads.

Using the Agent Based Installer or openshift-install binary to get an initial OpenShift cluster is fairly straight forward and automated very well, regardless of customer footprint desire (Baremetal, VM, Cloud, etc).   However, to turn this OpenShift cluster into a Hub cluster (which can then deploy other OpenShift clusters called Managed clusters) the current methodology is described in docs and is a manual process.  The methodology includes: (installing ACM, TALM, GitOps, the ZTP plugin override, having persistent storage available, etc) and consumers of this solution (internal and external entities) all attempt to automate these aspects in their own unique ways (scripts, ansible, GitOps, kustomize, etc).  This leads to fragmentation and repeated troubleshooting steps when things are not all installed & configured properly. 

This RFE proposes to study from a UI/UX friendly perspective the barrier to entry in establishing an OpenShift Hub cluster, with the aim of improving the user experience.  One potential option is creating a meta Operator (meaning it serves to facilitate the other operators in ZTP by providing dependencies), with the goal to turn an OpenShift cluster into a Hub cluster in a much easier and more automated way than Red Hat has today.

3. Why does the customer need this? (List the business requirements here)

Feedback received from customers and partners is: it is difficult to get started with bootstrapping a Hub cluster to begin the process of deploying Managed clusters via ZTP.   This leads to a poor support experience, or even cases of using one of the many other OpenShift installation methods in lieu because of complexity.

• Improved partner/customer experience by reducing partner/customer manual errors that are later troubleshooted by Red Hat
• Maximize productivity: cost and time savings dealing with same support tickets over and over again that always incur into repeated troubleshooting steps.

4. List any affected packages or components.

GitOps ZTP plugin, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management (RHACM),  Red Hat OpenShift GitOps, Topology Aware Lifecycle Manager (TALM)