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Chapter 19. Working with Operators

Note

Validate or Certify your operator image or necessary container image as a component before proceeding with partner validation or Red Hat Operator certification. All containers referenced in an Operator Bundle must already be validated or certified and published in the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog prior to beginning to certify an Operator Bundle.

19.1. Introduction to Operators

A Kubernetes operator is a method of packaging, deploying, and managing a Kubernetes application. Our Operator certification program ensures that the partner’s operator is deployable by Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM) on the OpenShift platform and is formatted properly, using Red Hat certified container images.

Partner Validation - Select this type of certification, if you want to validate your product using your own criteria and test suite on Red Hat platforms. This partner validation allows you to publish your software offerings on the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog more quickly. However, validated workloads may not incorporate all of Red Hat integration requirements and best practices. We encourage you to continue your efforts toward Red Hat certification.

Certified - Select this type of certification, if you want your product to undergo thorough testing by using Red Hat’s test suite, and benefit from collaborative support. Your products will meet your standards and Red Hat’s criteria, including interoperability, lifecycle management, security, and support requirements.

Products that meet the requirements and complete the certification workflow get listed on the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog. Partners will receive a logo to promote their product certification.

19.2. Certification workflow for Operators

Note

Red Hat recommends that you are a Red Hat Certified Engineer or hold equivalent experience before starting the certification process.

Task Summary

The certification workflow includes three primary steps-

  1. Section 19.2.1, “Certification on-boarding for Operators”
  2. Section 19.2.2, “Certification testing for Operators”
  3. Section 19.2.3, “Publishing the certified Operator on the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog”

19.2.1. Certification on-boarding for Operators

Perform the steps outlined for certification onboarding:

  1. Join the Red Hat Connect for Technology Partner Program.
  2. Agree to the program terms and conditions.

  3. Create your product listing by selecting your desired product category. You can select from the available product categories:

    1. Containerized Application
    2. Standalone Application
    3. OpenStack Infrastructure
  4. Complete your company profile.
  5. Add components to the product listing.
  6. Certify components for your product listing.

Additional resources

For detailed instructions about creating your first product listing, see Creating a product.

19.2.2. Certification testing for Operators

To run the certification test:

  1. Fork the Red Hat upstream repository.
  2. Install and run the Red Hat certification pipeline on your test environment.
  3. Review the test results and troubleshoot, if any issues.
  4. Submit the certification results to Red Hat through a pull request.
  5. If you want Red Hat to run all the tests then create a pull request. This triggers the certification hosted pipeline to run all the certification checks on Red Hat infrastructure.
Note

It is possible that some operator releases seemingly disappear from the catalog, which happens when the graph gets automatically pruned, resulting in some operator versions being excluded from the update graph. Because of that, you will get blocked from releasing an operator bundle when it results in a channel with fewer or equal release versions than the one before.

In the case that you want to prune the graph intentionally, you can do so by skipping a test and restarting the pipeline using the following available commands in your pull request:

/test skip <test_case_name>

test_case_name test will be skipped. Note that only a subset of tests can be skipped.

/pipeline restart certified-hosted-pipeline

The hosted pipeline will re-trigger.

Additional resources

For detailed instructions about certification testing, see Running the certification test suite.

19.2.3. Publishing the certified Operator on the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog

The Partner Validated or Certified Operator must be added to your product’s Product Listing page on the Red Hat Partner Connect portal. Once published, your product listing is displayed on the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog, by using the product information that you provide. You can publish both the Partner Validated and Certified Operator on the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog with the respective labels.

Additional resources

For more details about operators, see:

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