DataPlane: add self healing for "live" resources when BG controller is enabled

[pmalek]

Problem statement

Kong/gateway-operator-archive#91 introduced "self-healing" concept which made the operator replace the subresources (managed by the operator) to be not only updated in case a configuration drift happened but also recreated when they got deleted for some reason. So e.g. DataPlane Deployment would get recreated whenever it would get deleted.

After the introduction of BlueGreen DataPlane controller this stopped being the case when said controller is enabled because the execution of a reconciliation is only delegated to DataPlaneReconciler under concrete conditions: currently whenever a DataPlane doesn't have a BlueGreen rollout strategy defined and whenever it's "not ready":

gateway-operator/controllers/dataplane_bluegreen_controller.go

Lines 80 to 89 in 4ec986a

	// Blue Green rollout strategy is not enabled, delegate to DataPlane controller.
	if dataplane.Spec.Deployment.Rollout == nil || dataplane.Spec.Deployment.Rollout.Strategy.BlueGreen == nil {
	trace(log, "no Rollout with BlueGreen strategy specified, delegating to DataPlaneReconciler", req)
	return r.DataPlaneController.Reconcile(ctx, req)
	}
	if !k8sutils.IsReady(&dataplane) {
	debug(log, "DataPlane is not ready yet to proceed with BlueGreen rollout, delegating to DataPlaneReconciler", req)
	return r.DataPlaneController.Reconcile(ctx, req)
	}

What works now with regards to the above:

• self-healing of "preview" subresources
• recreation of "live" resources on promotion

This issue tracks the effort of re-introducing the self-healing aspect to DataPlanes with BlueGreen rollout strategy for "live" resources.

Proposed solution(s)

• Use the DataPlane history as implemented in https://github.com/Kong/gateway-operator/issues/1031 to get the latest live DataPlane spec
• Recreate live resources according to the DataPlane history

Additional information

Blocked by https://github.com/Kong/gateway-operator/issues/1031.

Acceptance criteria

• As a User I can expect the operator to re-create "live" DataPlane subresources whenever they are deleted
• As a User I can expect the operator to update/patch "live" DataPlane subresources whenever they are changed without promotion

[czeslavo]

I wasn't able to find that stated directly in the api-server documentation, but it appears from the code that there's garbage collection which prunes the oldest resource versions. It runs every 5 minutes and is not configurable. That makes storing ResourceVersion and relying on it to get the proper "live" spec not robust enough as it would break if the persisted version was garbage collected.

For confirmation, there's also this reply under a k8s issue which confirms this behavior.

I think we have to make our own way to persist the "live" spec explicitly in DataPlane. I'll try to go with storing the whole spec as a JSON blob.

[pmalek]

I'm not saying we do this now but the CRD to be implemented in #159 has the potential for serving the purpose of holding said spec.

It would also be easier for the user to reason what spec was used in particular rollout.

[czeslavo]

Yeah, definitely that's a good idea to try to mix those two to not repeat the same job twice. 👍 I'll see if I can make it a minimally viable solution that would just carry the spec for now, making it ready for extension.

[czeslavo]

Together with @pmalek we came to conclusions:

• we could prevent being forced to self-heal live resources if we used finalizers on the DataPlane owned resources (https://github.com/Kong/gateway-operator/issues/1048)
• we could treat the solution with finalizers like a stopgap between having no self-healing with BG (as it is right now) and having a full history that later could be used instead of the finalizer (https://github.com/Kong/gateway-operator/issues/1031)
• we need to make sure that when we finally implement “history” we’ll maybe get rid of finalizers (https://github.com/Kong/gateway-operator/issues/1049) and we’ll use the history to recreate all DataPlane-owned resources as DataPlane’s spec is persisted in the history

[czeslavo]

As for now https://github.com/Kong/gateway-operator/issues/1048 will be a simpler solution to the problem of accidental removals of DataPlane-owned resources, I'm moving this one out of Cloud Gateways Phase 0 milestone @pmalek.