Introducing idempotency to bigip_ltm resources

[rsawant23]

Resources like bigip_ltm_node, bigip_ltm_pool are currently not idempotent and fail when you try to re-create the same resource over. Are there any plans to make them idempotent or do you have a work around in place for this?

[nmenant]

We've confirmed issues on being able to update node/pool members once deployed. We already have an issue to talk about this here: #336 (comment)

Feel free to add your comments/feedback on this either here or in the issue #336

Tracking this internally with TER-477. we will be looking into bringing changes to the relevant resources. We want to make sure people using this will get a consistent behavior.

FWIW, have you looked into https://registry.terraform.io/providers/F5Networks/bigip/latest/docs/resources/bigip_as3 ? This isn't facing this situation and is the recommended path forward by F5.

[rsawant23]

I tried using the bigip_as3 provider and had a successful module that dynamically generated a json from an input file and then used the bigip_as3 resource to push it to the f5. But the bigip_ltm providers just felt well written and more conducive at this point where they were managing the resources in Terraform much better than the bigip_as3 where Terraform just knows the existence of a json file and not actual virtual server config.
I hence decided to pivot back to the bigip_ltm resources. Hopefully the bigip_as3 resource gets some great updates in the future and can generate the json based on inputs etc etc.

[nmenant]

AS3 is not designed to be able to handle "input parameters" since you're expected to provide the "state" of your BIG-IP or of a specific partition. Usually the json declaration would be created/maintained/updated by leveraging solutions like an SCM, CI Server solutions.

We agree that using the AS3 resource manually could quickly become a tedious process. We are looking into a way to give you the capability to leverage AS3 but on a per application basis. We are investigating the use of FAST (F5 Application Services Templates) to do this.

[RavinderReddyF5]

Hi @rsawant23 please open new issue for any issue with these resources on latest versions