The Operator Update Information Checker

June 19, 2023
Tags: , , ,

By Robert Baumgartner, Red Hat Austria, March 2023

Summary

Recently Red Hat has released a tool at the Customer Portal Labs that can give very detailed information about Operators and available updates, supported versions, and much more.

The name of this tool is Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Operator Update Information Checker

Where to find it: Customer Portal Labs

Overview

When you start the Operator Update Information Checker you will get a long list of currently available operators.
At the time of writing, I found 108 (!) pages.

It supports OpenShift versions 4.6 and above.

Now you can start to tweak the output.

Tweak / Filter the output

You can start by selecting a specific OpenShift version. Or maybe two, when you are interested in which operator is available in your current version and the version you are upgrading to, you can also specify two or more versions.

You can also start typing an operator name to get only a specific operator you are currently interested in.

In the above example screen, you see the two channels stable and stable-5.5 of the logging operator in OpenShift version 4.12.

  • For the stable channel, the current operator version is 4.6.3. And this version will be supported until OpenShift version 4.14. (MaxOCP)
  • For the stable-5.5 channel, the current operator version is 5.5.8. And this operator will not be supported in OpenShift after 4.12.

Many channels

When you select amq-streams (Kafka) you will find many channels available.

  • The stable channel points to version v2.3.0-1, the latest version.
  • The amq-streams-2.2.x channel points to version v2.2.1-0
  • The amq-streams-2.x channel points to v2.3.0.1

None of these operator channels has defined the latest version. This does not mean it will be supported forever. You have to look at the release information!

Version change with OpenShift version

If you select the MetalLB operator you will see an example of an operator that has just one channel. And when you upgrade from OpenShift version 4.10 to 4.12, the operator will be automatically upgraded to a newer version. (4.12.0-202303021943)

This tool on the Red Hat Customer Portal Labs will give you more detailed information about the life cycle of the long list of OpenShift operators. The numbers are all the time growing and the version mix requires such information.

Github: rbaumgar/openshift-operators