Please improve CRD upgrade approach to avoid deletion/recreation

[tomhaynes]

Checks

• I've already read https://docs.github.com/en/actions/hosting-your-own-runners/managing-self-hosted-runners-with-actions-runner-controller/troubleshooting-actions-runner-controller-errors and I'm sure my issue is not covered in the troubleshooting guide.
• I am using charts that are officially provided

Controller Version

v0.12,v0.11,v0.9

Deployment Method

Helm

Checks

• This isn't a question or user support case (For Q&A and community support, go to Discussions).
• I've read the Changelog before submitting this issue and I'm sure it's not due to any recently-introduced backward-incompatible changes

To Reproduce

Follow the upgrade instructions for any of the mentioned releases.

Describe the bug

Requiring CRD removal / reinstallation causes a very large overhead / headache for engineering teams using these runners. This is removing the entire CI/CD framework, so the only re-course is to manually resolve this by hand. With a large, distributed estate this takes a lot of time and effort.

Describe the expected behavior

Please follow best practice with regards to CRD management, specifically versioning https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/extend-kubernetes/custom-resources/custom-resource-definition-versioning/

Best practice summary:

1. Never delete and reinstall a CRD in a production cluster. This leads to data loss.
2. For non-breaking changes (like adding new optional fields), you can often update the schema of an existing version directly. Always test these changes.
3. For any breaking changes, introduce a new version to the spec.versions list.
4. Implement a Conversion Webhook to handle the translation of objects between different API versions on the fly.

Additional Context

N/A

Controller Logs

N/A

Runner Pod Logs

N/A