1. Proposed title of this feature request

Automated machine pool upgrades following control plane upgrades in ROSA HCP, aligning the experience with ROSA Classic and self-managed OpenShift, and enabling a fully automated, hands-off upgrade workflow.

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

ROSA HCP clusters currently require manual initiation of machine pool upgrades after a hosted control plane upgrade completes. While control plane upgrades can be scheduled, machine pool upgrades must be triggered separately via ROSA CLI.

This behavior differs from:

• Self-managed OpenShift

• ROSA Classic clusters

where worker nodes are upgraded automatically as part of the cluster upgrade workflow.

Current behavior -

According to official documentation: https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_openshift_service_on_aws/4/html/upgrading/rosa-hcp-upgrading#rosa-hcp-upgrading-cli-machinepool_rosa-hcp-upgrading

“You cannot upgrade the hosted control plane at the same time as any machine pool upgrade. You will need to upgrade the hosted control plane first, and then upgrade machine pools.”

After the control plane upgrade completes successfully:

• No automatic worker/machine pool upgrade is triggered

• Customers must manually initiate or schedule the machine pool upgrade

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

This limitation introduces manual operational steps into an otherwise automated managed service workflow.

For customers adopting ROSA HCP specifically to:

• Reduce operational overhead

• Avoid manual cluster lifecycle actions

• Enable fully automated upgrades

The current behavior is a blocker to their operational model.

Customers report:

• Manual follow-up actions are not acceptable in their automation strategy

• Waiting for one automated process to finish only to manually start another automation is an operational anti-pattern

• Increased risk of human error and delayed worker upgrades

Customer wants to avoid:

• Manual CLI commands

• Manual UI interactions

• External scripting workarounds

4. List any affected packages or components.

• ROSA HCP
• Upgrade Controller/workflow
• Machine Pool

Expectations from this RFE : 

Provide an option to automatically upgrade machine pools immediately after a successful hosted control plane upgrade, without requiring additional manual intervention.

Example desired functionality:

• A configurable setting, such as:
  “Automatically upgrade machine pools after control plane upgrade completes successfully”

• Support for:

• • Immediate automatic upgrade

• • Or scheduled upgrade relative to control plane completion

• Available via:

• • ROSA CLI

• • Red Hat Cluster Manager UI

• • (Optional) API

The workarounds below are not acceptable :

• Manually running rosa upgrade machinepool

• Pre-scheduling machine pool upgrades with estimated timing

• External automation/scripts polling for control plane upgrade completion

These approaches defeat the purpose of using ROSA as a managed service.