Background:

A critical part of MicroShift's CI configuration is the stand up of a bespoke test instance on which to deploy MicroShift and execute tests.  Up to now, these images have been based on the rhel-cloud project's public images, which are created and maintained as a joint effort between Google and Red Hat[1].  RHEL versions not yet GA are not available from that source, meaning that we would have to wait for the project to publish a RHEL 9.2 image before we could begin testing.  This is not a tenable solution when we need to test against the latest pre-release RHEL version right now.

Secondly, GCP requires that ARM based VMs use a specialized virtual network driver that must be built from source [2].  I spent a couple days trying to untangle build dependencies and finding alternate sources for build tools (those linked by the project are 404's).  I wasn't able to compile the driver in the end.

Goals:

• CI testing on pre-release versions of RHEL in a private a secure manner.  Pre-release images cannot be publicly accessible.
• CI testing on ARM versions of RHEL
• Documented workflow for updating the pre-release RHEL images to ensure knowledge is not siloed.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/images/premium/rhel-faq

[2] https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/compute-virtual-ethernet-linux