Chapter 1. Introduction to Red Hat OpenShift certification policies

Red Hat OpenShift certification is offered to commercial software vendors that deliver cloud-native software products targeting Red Hat OpenShift as the deployment platform.

The certification process allows partners to continuously verify if their product meets Red Hat standards of interoperability, security, and life cycle management when deployed on Red Hat OpenShift.

Our customers benefit from a trusted application and infrastructure stack, tested and jointly supported by Red Hat and the Partner.

Red Hat offers you the ability to certify or validate your products.

Red Hat-certified products undergo thorough testing and are collaboratively supported with you. These products meet your standards and Red Hat’s criteria, including functionality, interoperability, lifecycle management, security, and support requirements.

Partner-validated products are tested and supported by you. Validation allows you to enable and publish your software offerings more quickly. However, by definition, validated workloads do not include the full thoroughness of Red Hat certification. We encourage you to continue efforts toward stabilization, upstream acceptance, Red Hat enablement, and Red Hat certification.

Understanding the differences between certification and validation, along with the capabilities, limitations, and achievements of your products, is essential for you and your customers.

Red Hat customers receive the best support experience when using components from our robust ecosystem of certified enterprise hardware, software, and cloud partners.

Red Hat provides support for Red Hat-certified products and Red Hat software according to the Red Hat Service Level Agreement (SLA). If a certified or validated third-party component is involved in a customer issue, Red Hat collaborates with you to resolve it according to the Third party support policy.

Red Hat does not stipulate customer support policies. However, we require your support in assisting customers with diagnosing and resolving issues related to the functionality, interoperability, lifecycle management, and security of your software in conjunction with ours.

Being listed as certified or validated in the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog indicates your commitment to supporting your products and providing reliable solutions for our joint customers, adhering to your policies with Red Hat products.

Certification and validation is available for workload products that target Red Hat OpenShift as their deployment platform. Red Hat recommends that you manage the product’s life cycle by using technology native to Kubernetes, such as Operators or Helm charts, because they deliver a user experience that is closely integrated with Red Hat OpenShift. For these two options, certification covers the packaging format and compatibility with the Red Hat OpenShift tools. If your product uses a different technology for installation and upgrades, certification will be limited to the container images.

Products that deliver infrastructure services for Red Hat OpenShift, storage services provided through a CSI driver or networking services integrated via a CNI plugin, require tight integration with the platform’s life cycle management. Therefore, they do not qualify for validation and must be managed by an Operator and demonstrate compliance with the corresponding Kubernetes APIs.

Specialized certification and validation is available for cloud-native network functions for the Telecommunications market.

Red Hat OpenShift software certification and validation is available for releases of Red Hat OpenShift v4.x which are in the Full, Maintenance or Extended Update Support (EUS) life cycle phases.

Certification is available for all supported architectures for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform v4.x releases. At present this includes x86_64, s390x, ppc64, and aarch64.

Certifications are awarded to a single architecture. Apply for multiple certifications if your product supports more than one architecture.

Red Hat certifications and validations remain valid for 12 months or until the corresponding Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (RHOCP) v.4.x release exits the Extended Update Support Term 2 of the RHOCP lifecycle, whichever time period is shorter. To maintain the certification or partner validation status, you must recertify or revalidate on newer versions of your software or Red Hat OpenStack Platform (RHOSP). Certifications, validations and associated products remain published until they are no longer valid or the Red Hat product version is retired from the catalog.

OpenShift now includes Extended Update Support (EUS) and Extended Update Support Term 2 (EUS-T2) options, which require changes to product build and release practices, as well as ISV certification.

The window for certifications or validations opens with the GA release of the minor version through the OpenShift Extended Update Support based on the even and odd schedules.

Supporting EUS-to-EUS updates is crucial for a seamless customer experience. For example, if you certify an ISV software version 1 on RHOCP 4.14 and version 3 is on RHOCP 4.16, dual certification on 4.14 can be beneficial. This is particularly relevant if the software supports direct upgrades from version 1 to version 3 and version 3 is compatible with RHOCP 4.14. In such cases, certifying version 3 on RHOCP 4.14 allows customers to upgrade their software while remaining on RHOCP 4.14 before transitioning to 4.16, ensuring a smoother process and minimizing disruptions.

Refer to the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Life Cycle Policy for more details.

Red Hat encourages you to plan even-to-even updates for OpenShift releases reaching "Maintenance Support Ends". However, this extended product support offers flexibility for any necessary update paths, such as progressing from OpenShift 4.14 through 4.15 to 4.16, ensuring uninterrupted support for our joint customers.

Select unique product names and branding that comply with Red Hat trademark guidelines. This helps our joint customers clearly identify products that use Red Hat Marks and their source. This policy covers all catalog listings and individual product components.

A key benefit of Red Hat Certification is support. Ensure to check if you in coordination with Red Hat, support all the software necessary for customers to deploy and utilize your software on RHOCP.

You must ensure that your product, with the same packages and components that you submitted for certification, works with the configurations supported by RHOCP.

Ensure your product does not make any modifications to the RHOCP stack, including the host operating system, other than configuration changes that are covered in the product documentation. Unauthorized changes can impact the support from Red Hat.

Red Hat encourages you to check that your product is capable of running on any node in a OpenShift cluster, regardless of the type of Red Hat OpenShift deployment (bare metal, virtual environment, or cloud service), installation process (IPI or UPI), or cluster size. If there are any limitations due to dependencies on hardware components, public cloud services, or any other cluster configuration requirements, these should be mentioned in the product’s documentation which should be linked to your product catalog listing.

To reduce security risks, ensure that your products run in the most restrictive Security Context Constraint (SCC). For example, restricted-v2 for Red Hat OpenShift 4.12. If the product requires additional privileges, Red Hat recommends using the most restrictive SCC that provides the right capabilities. This configuration information should be included as part of the product documentation, and the certification tests must be conducted using the same security settings that are recommended for end users.