Initiative Overview

Executive Summary – The What & Why:
Currently, CI jobs are extremely time-consuming, often taking up to 6 hours to complete. A significant portion of this time approximately 2 hours and 40 minutes is spent on repeatedly deploying the OCP. This prolonged cycle impairs our ability to iterate quickly, debug issues, and adopt new changes efficiently.
The goal of this initiative is to reduce CI job duration by minimizing unnecessary OCP re-deployments. When the existing OCP cluster is still valid (i.e., no version upgrade is needed), we plan to reuse it by cleaning up the OpenStack deployment and redeploying only the components required for each job. This change is expected to make our CI pipeline faster, more maintainable, and more responsive to development needs.

Goals

• Reduce the overall runtime of CI jobs by avoiding redundant OCP cluster deployments.

• Enable more rapid testing and integration of features and hopefully uni jobs collaborating with Arx and his team.

Who benefits and how?

• OpenStack team benefits directly through faster development cycles, improved debugging capabilities, and a more efficient CI process.

• Indirectly, customers may also benefit as this optimization allows quicker validation and delivery of new features. THIS IS NOT OFFICIAL FEATURE FOR CUSTOMERS

• CIOPS team can use that also from Uni-job after testing that. 

Current State vs. Future State:

• Today: Every job triggers a full OCP deployment regardless of necessity, leading to wasted time and resources.

• With This Initiative: The CI pipeline intelligently reuses existing OCP clusters when appropriate, significantly reducing execution time and improving pipeline stability.

Done - Acceptance Criteria

• CI jobs are capable of detecting when the current OCP cluster can be reused.

• OCP clusters are only deployed when necessary, based on version or state validation.

• The new process is integrated seamlessly into the existing CI pipelines and provides consistent, reliable results.

Out of Scope

• This initiative is scoped exclusively for internal CI jobs and Uni jobs as agreed with Arx.

• General-purpose CI pipelines or those outside th Arx domain are not included.

• Automation for full OCP version upgrades or external cluster lifecycle management is also out of scope.