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Stuck in a loop with multiple challenge solver pods found for challenge #7768

Description

@MOZGIII

Describe the bug:
The acmesolver pods for some challenges are created and removed in a loop, and cert-manager can't make progress.

multiple existing challenge solver pods found and cleaned up. retrying challenge sync

redacted-logs.txt

Expected behaviour:

  1. Somehow, only one pod to be created per challenge.
  2. When it so happens that there are multiple pods created per challenge - the cert manager should not get stuck in a loop of creating and removing them, and should, instead be able to proceed - like, remove all pods but one, or sth.

Steps to reproduce the bug:
Idk what happened that caused this bug.

Anything else we need to know?:
I suspect it started with k8s somehow creating more than one pod in the first place (i.e. due to eviction) and cert-manager got two error notifications via the watch subscription, handled them each be re-creating the pods - and that's how the loops starts; but this is speculation.

It was working for ages until it broke down ~22 days ago, we were at version v1.13.x. Today I've updated to v1.17.2 - it didn;t solve the issue. We didn't change anything in the setup.

Out of 200+ ingresses with certs, only ~6 are at this state. 2 new ones, and ~4-ish renewing - same odd behavior. Different namespaces, but same ingress controllers and ClusterIssuer. Using http01 solver (you know, the one that needs to create pods).

Switching to a different ClusterIssuer that has a dns01 instead of http01 makes the ingress get a certificate quickly and correctly, however, when switched back to the http01-powered ClusterIssue, the certificate renew is attempted and the issue returns.

I'm hesitant to experiment on this stuff more - as there is a potential risk of losing certificates of all our ingresses.

Environment details:

  • Kubernetes version:
    Client Version: v1.32.3
    Kustomize Version: v5.5.0
    Server Version: v1.32.3

  • Cloud-provider/provisioner: scaleway

  • cert-manager version: v1.17.2

  • Install method: helm

/kind bug

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