Problem:

Not all admins desire the samples content, nor do they want to pay for the resources of running the operator when they do not want the samples content.

Goal:

Make it possible to disable the samples operator at install time, while still having a supported+upgradeable cluster.

Why is it important?

Today it's possible via manual configuration to exclude all the sample imagestreams+templates, but it's not a great admin experience. Furthermore, the operator itself will continue running even if no content is being reconciled.

Being able to disable the entire operator is a simpler/cleaner experience that gives a more desirable result.

Use cases

I'm an administrator who wants to minimize my openshift cluster footprint and who does not want the samples content installed on my cluster (possibly due to security concerns, because i have images i want teams to use, or because the cluster isn't being used for anything that would benefit from the samples)

Acceptance criteria

It is possible at install time to opt-out of having the samples operator installed. Once the cluster comes up, the samples operator is not running and no samples content is present on the cluster.

Note: the static sample content which is not directly managed by the samples operator (it just lives in the samples repo as additional manifests) should still be installed, because that content (e.g. the tests, cli, etc imagestreams) are still needed for tooling purposes.

Dependencies (External/Internal)

Needs the optional capabilities feature to be implemented in the installer+cvo, but nothing stops you from annotating the resources now, to mark them as a "capability"

Design Artifacts

See the capabilities enhancement proposal here:
https://github.com/openshift/enhancements/blob/master/enhancements/installer/component-selection.md

Exploration

Note