Need a way to pause reconciliation of individual resources

[turkenh]

What problem are you facing?

Recently, while I was working on the migration guide for provider-gcp, I needed a way to make sure that no crossplane or provider controllers reconcile on some custom resources (managed, composite, configuration etc). However, currently, we don't have such an option today to pause reconciliation hence I had to scale down controller pods to 0.

How could Crossplane help solve your problem?

Introduce a way to pause reconciliation on resources and ACK this in the status so that user could make sure that crossplane will no longer take any action for that resource.

We could use an annotation like the following:

crossplane.io/paused: "true"

[negz]

I've been kind of hesitant about this in the past, but only because I worry that folks might accidentally miss that some MRs are paused. I wonder if we could solve that with events/metrics? e.g. Perhaps when this annotation existed the managed resource reconciler could return early without actually doing any meaningful reconciling, but emit a Paused event. We could also potentially add a new conditioned status type (e.g. Paused).

[negz]

"Needs design" is possibly a bit much for this one - alignment and discussion in this issue may be sufficient.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[praveenadini]

Hi Team, We are facing the same issue with pausing reconcile on claims or the MR's created by claims. Is there any fix that is available to achieve this.

[bobh66]

https://docs.crossplane.io/latest/concepts/managed-resources/#paused