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Configuring Operator Lifecycle Manager features

The Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM) controller is configured by an OLMConfig custom resource (CR) named cluster. Cluster administrators can modify this resource to enable or disable certain features.

This document outlines the features currently supported by OLM that are configured by the OLMConfig resource.

Disabling copied CSVs

When an Operator is installed by Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM), a simplified copy of its cluster service version (CSV) is created in every namespace that the Operator is configured to watch. These CSVs are known as copied CSVs and communicate to users which controllers are actively reconciling resource events in a given namespace.

When Operators are configured to use the AllNamespaces install mode, versus targeting a single or specified set of namespaces, a copied CSV is created in every namespace on the cluster. On especially large clusters, with namespaces and installed Operators potentially in the hundreds or thousands, copied CSVs consume an untenable amount of resources, such as OLM’s memory usage, cluster etcd limits, and networking.

To support these larger clusters, cluster administrators can disable copied CSVs for Operators installed with the AllNamespaces mode.

If you disable copied CSVs, a user’s ability to discover Operators in the OperatorHub and CLI is limited to Operators installed directly in the user’s namespace.

If an Operator is configured to reconcile events in the user’s namespace but is installed in a different namespace, the user cannot view the Operator in the OperatorHub or CLI. Operators affected by this limitation are still available and continue to reconcile events in the user’s namespace.

This behavior occurs for the following reasons:

  • Copied CSVs identify the Operators available for a given namespace.

  • Role-based access control (RBAC) scopes the user’s ability to view and discover Operators in the OperatorHub and CLI.
Procedure

  • Edit the OLMConfig object named cluster and set the spec.features.disableCopiedCSVs field to true:

    $ oc apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: operators.coreos.com/v1
kind: OLMConfig
metadata:
  name: cluster
spec:
  features:
    disableCopiedCSVs: true (1)
EOF
    1 Disabled copied CSVs for AllNamespaces install mode Operators
Verification

  • When copied CSVs are disabled, OLM captures this information in an event in the Operator’s namespace:

    $ oc get events
    Example output
    LAST SEEN   TYPE      REASON               OBJECT                                MESSAGE
85s         Warning   DisabledCopiedCSVs   clusterserviceversion/my-csv.v1.0.0   CSV copying disabled for operators/my-csv.v1.0.0

    When the spec.features.disableCopiedCSVs field is missing or set to false, OLM recreates the copied CSVs for all Operators installed with the AllNamespaces mode and deletes the previously mentioned events.

Additional resources