Add ability to consume already-purchased Red Hat OCP licenses instead of being billed for ARO licensing

[redhatstuart]

Customers that have existing relationships with Red Hat and deployments of OpenShift Container Platform already have pre-purchased licenses for OCP. Since ARO includes the licenses for OCP as part of its deployment charges, this effectively enables a "double-billing" issue on behalf of the customer. As such, it would provide great value and flexibility for customers to be able to elect to pay the OCP licensing fees for ARO by either a) native deployment (current method) or b) by means of a pull-secret and thus having licensing billing switched off during the deployment.

[TiloGit]

see also: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs/issues/69659

[TiloGit]

any update on this?

[t-alt]

This would enable customers to use certain services provided by Red Hat as well, such as cluster cost management.

For customers without a pre-existing OpenShift license, the optimal solution would be that the licenses that are being consumed by ARO are somehow also shared with the customer so that they can add it to their corporate Red Hat account. This would spare the additional overhead created by the procurement process.

[nmiethe]

Bumping this again, as I have potential customers looking to move to ARO, but want to maintain ownership of OpenShift licenses with the rest of their RH accounts. This will definitely only gain traction as we continue moving forward with this collaboration.

[ezYakaEagle442]

@kagowda

[alfred4ibm]

any update on this?