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. This allows users to benefit from a trusted application and infrastructure stack, tested and jointly supported by Red Hat and the Partner.
Container images and Operators are certified separately and have their own procedures and requirements. These requirements can be changed from time to time so the best option is always to refer to Red Hat's Software Certification Documentation.
These are broken into two sections, the Red Hat OpenShift Software Certification Policy Guide which describes the requirements that must be met for certification, and the Red Hat Software Certification Workflow Guide which covers the steps needed to achieve certification.
An important prerequisite for certification is to become part of the Red Hat Partner Program and specifically to view the Red Hat OpenShift Certification pages.
The up to date policies for certifying container images can be found in the latest version of the Red Hat OpenShift Software Certification Policy Guide Chapter 2
Once you are confident that your container meets the policy requirements you need to follow the workflow outlined in Section II of the Red Hat OpenShift Software Certification Workflow Guide
They should also meet the Partner Documentation requirements in Chapter 6
Each container managed by the Operator (Operands) must be certified by Red Hat and must meet the requirements listed in the Requirements for container images section. Once that is done the Operator as a whole also needs to be certified and so needs to meet the technical and operational certification requirements outlined in Chapter 3 of the Red Hat OpenShift Software Certification Policy Guide
Then, similar to the Container Images, Section III of the Red Hat OpenShift Software Certification Workflow Guide details the process to generate the test results and submit them to Red Hat to receive certification.
Product Documentation for Red Hat Software Certification
Red Hat container certification at-a-glance