Pausing Reconciliation

When deploying a Package, Package Operator automatically reconciles all objects under it. Therefore, any changes made to the fields controlled by Package Operator in the child objects will be reverted by the Package Operator reconcilers.

To temporarily stop the reconciliation of these objects, the .spec.paused field has been introduced to the Package and ObjectDeployment APIs. When set to true, all reconciliation of the object and its children will be stopped (except for the .status field).

1. Pausing Mechanism #

The .spec.paused field is propagated down the ownership chain. Therefore, after pausing a Package object, the underlying ObjectDeployment is paused, then finally, the ObjectSet is paused. As a consequence, an ObjectDeployment may be individually paused only when it is not owned by a Package object.

Even when paused, each object reflects its status properly. When the lowest object in the Package Operator API chain is paused (i.e., the ObjectSet), the .status field of the object is updated with the Paused condition set to true. This condition is then propagated up to the parent objects.

To unpause the reconciliation of a Package or ObjectDeployment, simply set the .spec.paused field to false or remove it entirely.

2. Pausing via the CLI #

To accommodate pausing the reconciliation of (Cluster)Package objects without the need for manual editing, the pause and unpause subcommands have been added to the kubectl package CLI.

The command modifies the .spec.paused field and the waits for the object to report the Paused condition. It also allows the user to provide a message (e.g., the reason for the pause) which will be stored in the package-operator.run/pause-message annotation.

Usage:

kubectl package pause <resource>/<name> [-n <namespace>] [-m <message>]
kubectl package unpause <resource>/<name> [-n <namespace>]