Description

The creation of the pause container is a required as part of a pod starting. In OCP, the pause container for Windows pods has its image defined within the containerd config. This means that all users of WMCO must use the image that we specify, currently "mcr.microsoft.com/oss/kubernetes/pause:3.9".

This approach poses two issues. The first is that we are requiring users to use software shipped by Microsoft, and not Red Hat. If any issues pop up with the image, we are relying on Microsoft to fix them. While we haven't ran into any issues with the pause image in the past, it would be safer to have the image under our control. This is especially important as the pause image is required for the creation of all containers. If Microsoft's registry is not accessible for whatever reason, Windows nodes that have not already pulled the image will not be functional.

The second issue is that nodes in disconnected clusters are unable to pull the image. This causes a required step to mirror the pause image to a private registry accessible by the cluster, and then create an ImageTagMirrorSet. This has been a pain point for users, as containerd mirror settings do not behave the same as crio-o.

Acceptance Criteria

• A pause image for Windows is shipped as part of OCP, and is used for Windows nodes