Description:

1. Proposed title of this feature request
OCP Support for GCP placement policies

2. What is the nature and description of the request?
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides placement policies that allow specifying the relative placement of VM instances within a zone. These include:

• Spread placement policies: distribute instances across different availability domains within a zone to maximize resilience.
• Compact placement policies: place instances close together (e.g., same rack) to minimize network latency.

The request is to add native OpenShift (OCP) support for defining and managing GCP placement policies for control plane and worker nodes

3. Why does the customer need this? (Business requirements)

• This capability is critical to achieving high availability and failure domain diversity per Red Hat’s OCP on GCP guidance.
• It enables low-latency placements for tightly-coupled workloads by colocating VMs via compact policies.
• Aligns OCP with a core GCP feature, reducing operational risk and manual configuration drift.

4. Affected packages or components

• OpenShift on GCP provider integration (Cluster API provider for GCP)
• Installer configuration for GCP (install-config / platform.gcp)
• MachineSets / MachineHealthCheck / NodePool (as applicable)
• Documentation for OCP on GCP (HA and performance guidance)