Conditions - Cluster status at glance

Glossary

Condition: The state of an object with regard to its appearance, quality, or working order.

Summary

In Cluster API a workload cluster is composed of a fair number of Kubernetes objects, and to understand the status of your Cluster you have to jump from one object to another. Or, in the worst case, you have to look at the logs from the Cluster API pods to get more details on why things aren’t working.

This proposal introduces the concept of “conditions” as a tool designed to provide an “at a glance” view of the status of a cluster, providing immediate answers and fine-grained guidance when investigating issues.

Motivation

Cluster API requires a large number of objects to define a workload cluster: Cluster, InfrastructureCluster, KubeadmControlPlane, MachineDeployments, Machines, and so on. Each object carries its own status. Operators need to describe each object individually to determine an overall cluster health summary.
Objects can be tied to each other directly (via object references), or indirectly (via owner references). These dependencies can often require a deep knowledge of the project’s internals and its APIs to investigate issues or problems.
Some objects, like MachineSets or MachineDeployments, are considered a collection of other objects (e.g. MachineSets). Their status is effectively tied to the status of each item in the collection.

Goals

To define a data model for the Condition type.
To introduce the first set of conditions on Cluster API core objects (up to a minimal level of detail required for an initial implementation).
To provide flexibility for providers to incrementally adopt this proposal.
To provide flexibility for providers to add, remove, or update their own set of conditions over time.
To provide utilities and libraries for a unified way to work with conditions.

Non-Goals/Future Work

To pre-define every possible condition.
To define the exact semantic for every condition introduced in the proposal (this should be done during implementation).
To remove or deprecate Phase, FailureMessage, and FailureReason from Status in v0.3.
To remove or deprecate usage of Events.

Proposal

User Stories

Story 1

As a developer, as a user, as a tool built on top of Cluster API, I would like to have common types for defining conditions on different Cluster API or provider objects.

Story 2

As a user, I would like to quickly understand the current state of my cluster during the initial provisioning workflow.

Story 3

As a user, I would like to quickly understand the current state of my cluster during the upgrade workflow.

Story 4

As a user, I would like to quickly understand the operational state of my cluster.

Implementation Details/Notes/Constraints

This proposal aims to be consistent with the target state of conditions in Kubernetes (see KEP).

At the same time, we should think that Cluster API presents some specific challenges that are not common to the core Kubernetes objects:

Cluster API has a high number of long-running operations, and this makes it crucial for the success of this proposal to introduce a clean way to provide evidence about what is happening during those operations, and not only to show the final state of the operations.
Cluster API has a complex hierarchy of objects, and the informative value of a condition, especially in the core types, is highly correlated to the possibility to collect and summarize meaningful information from the underlying hierarchy of objects.
Cluster API defines a set of core objects and extension points (e.g. bootstrap, control plane and infrastructure). Extension points are defined by a set of contracts, which each provider adheres to. To provide a great user experience, core and provider contracts should be extended to allow for better coordination and visibility based on conditions.

This proposal consists of three parts:

Data model changes.
Constraints/design principles for implementing conditions in Cluster API-
Use case driven examples of how conditions could improve observability on Cluster API.

Data Model Changes

In this section we outline the proposed API additions.

All the changes can be implemented in the v0.3.x timeframe (no breaking changes, only additions).

Following types should be defined in Cluster API / v1alpha3 api.

// ConditionType is a valid value for Condition.Type.
type ConditionType string

// ConditionSeverity expresses the severity of a Condition Type failing.
type ConditionSeverity string

const (
  // ConditionSeverityError specifies that a failure of a condition type
  // should be viewed as an error.
  ConditionSeverityError ConditionSeverity = "Error"

  // ConditionSeverityWarning specifies that a failure of a condition type
  // should be viewed as a warning, but that things could still work.
  ConditionSeverityWarning ConditionSeverity = "Warning"

  // ConditionSeverityInfo specifies that a failure of a condition type
  // should be viewed as purely informational, and that things could still work.
  ConditionSeverityInfo ConditionSeverity = "Info"

  // ConditionSeverityNone should apply only if the condition is in state "True".
  // As ConditionSeverityNone is the default for conditions we use the empty string (coupled with omitempty)
  ConditionSeverityNone ConditionSeverity = ""
)

// Condition defines an extension to status (i.e. an observation) of a Cluster API resource.
type Condition struct {
   // Type of condition.
   Type ConditionType `json:"type" description:"type of status condition"`

   // Status of the condition, one of True, False, Unknown.
   Status corev1.ConditionStatus `json:"status"`

   // Severity with which to treat failures of this type of condition.
   // When this is not specified, it defaults to Error.
   // +optional
   Severity ConditionSeverity `json:"severity,omitempty"`

   // LastTransitionTime is the last time the condition transitioned from one status to another.
   LastTransitionTime metav1.Time `json:"lastTransitionTime"`

   // The reason for the condition's last transition.
   // Reasons should be CamelCase.
   // +optional
   Reason string `json:"reason,omitempty" description:"one-word CamelCase reason for the condition's last transition"`

   // A human readable message indicating details about the transition.
   // +optional
   Message string `json:"message,omitempty" description:"human-readable message indicating details about last transition"`
}

// Conditions define an extension to status (i.e. an observation) of a Cluster API resource.
type Conditions []Condition

Every Cluster API resource except data-only objects which aren't reconciled (i.e. KubeadmConfigTemplate) SHOULD have conditions field in the status struct. e.g.

// ClusterStatus represent the status for the Cluster object
type ClusterStatus struct {
    ...
    // Conditions define a list of readiness conditions for the Cluster object
    Conditions Conditions `json:"conditions,omitempty"
}

Each Cluster API resource SHOULD define its own set of condition types, e.g.

// ConditionTypes for the cluster object 
const (
	ClusterInfrastructureReady ConditionType = "ClusterInfrastructureReady"
	
	...
)

Condition types MUST have a consistent polarity (i.e. "True = good");

Condition types SHOULD have one of the following suffix:

Ready, for resources which represent an ongoing status, like ControlplaneReady or MachineDeploymentsReady.
Succeeded, for resources which run-to-completion, e.g. CreateVPCSucceeded

When the above suffix are not adequate for a specific condition type, other suffix with positive meaning COULD be used (e.g. Completed, Healthy); however, it is recommended to balance this flexibility with the objective to provide a consistent condition naming across all the Cluster API objects.

The Severity field MUST be set only when Status=False and it is designed to provide a standard classification of possible conditions failure Reason.

Please note that the combination of Reason and Severity gives different meaning to a condition failure allowing to detect when a long-running task is still ongoing:

ControlPlaneReady=False, Reason=ScalingUp, Severity=Info

In other cases, the combination of Reason and Severity allows to detect when a failure is due to a catastrophic error or to other events that are transient or can be eventually remediated by a user intervention

MachineReady=False, Reason=MachineNotHealthy, Severity=Error
MachineReady=False, Reason=MachineUnderProbation, Severity=Warning
AWSMachineReady=False, Reason=SSHKeyMissing, Severity=Warning

A more contextualized example/explanation about the Severity field can be found in the “Cluster provisioning” example later on in this document.

Constraints

In order to ensure a consistent implementation of conditions across all the Cluster API components the following constraints/design principles MUST be applied:

Condition semantic

Condition types in Cluster API core objects MUST be provider agnostic.
Condition types in Cluster API core objects MUST represent the operational state of a component in the cluster, where the operational state is when the component is ready to serve application workloads. It should be avoided to represent only the infrastructure/provision part of the component's lifecycle.
Condition types in Cluster API provider-specific objects COULD be used for surfacing more granular/internal details about provisioning, but always with a user driven perspective (conditions != debug).
Operations like upgrades, scaling-up, or scaling-down, even if orchestrated in a non-disruptive fashion, MUST be considered as a deviation from the normal operational state of the cluster, and the operator should be always informed when those changes are happening. e.g. There should be a condition with Severity=Warning.

The Ready condition

A Ready condition SHOULD be provided at object level to represent the overall operational state of the component (NB. a more contextualized example/explanation of the Ready conditions can be found in the “Cluster provisioning” example later on in this document).
The Ready condition MUST be based on the summary of more detailed conditions existing on the same object, if defined. e.g. AWSCluster.Status.Conditions[Ready] condition should be the summary of VPCReady, SubnetsReady, InternetGatewaysReady conditions.
Detailed conditions at object level COULD be based on Ready conditions gathered from the dependent objects. e.g.
- Cluster.Status.Conditions[ClusterInfrastructureReady] is a condition based on infrastructure cluster state, e.g. AWSCluster.Status.Conditions[Ready].
- KubeadmControlPlane.Status.Conditions[MachinesReady] is a condition based on the aggregation of the underlying Machines.Status.Conditions[Ready] conditions.
A corollary of the above set of constraints is that an object SHOULD NEVER be in status Ready=True if one of the object's conditions are false or if one of the object dependents is in status Ready=False.

Controller changes

A controller MUST only evaluate Conditions based on the object it’s reconciling and its directly-referenced objects (dependents).
If the dependents objects are not exposing a Ready condition, the summary condition MUST NOT be generated and error MUST NOT be raised; please note that this approach (silently fail), is explicitly designed to allow an incremental implementation of conditions across providers; however, we are expecting this will change in the future.
In order to support an easy and consistent implementation of all the above constraints across all Cluster API components, all the controller MUST use a new set of utilities implemented in Cluster API for:
- Summarizing a list of conditions into another condition on the same object
- Mirroring a condition from an object to another.
- Aggregating a condition from a set of dependents objects.

The cluster provisioning workflow

Let’s consider the following timeline representing the workflow for the initial provisioning of a Cluster with ClusterAPI:

Conditions are expected to provide a simple and intuitive view of where a Cluster is with respect to this timeline.

In order to do so, Cluster.Status.Conditions should have:

A condition of type ClusterInfrastructureReady that should provide an observation point on the operational state of the cluster infrastructure.
A condition of type ControlPlaneReady that should provide an observation point on the operational state of the cluster control plane.
A condition of type WorkersReady that should provide an observation point on the operational state of the workers nodes.

The `ClusterInfrastructureReady` condition

In order to understand how ClusterInfrastructureReady condition can be, let’s take AWS as an example of how the cluster infrastructure process can be:

Provision Network
- Provision VPC
- Provision Subnets
- Provision InternetGateways
- ProvisionNatGateways
- Provision RouteTables
- Provision SecurityGroups
Provision Bastion Host
Etc.

Without getting into further details, clearly provisioning an operational cluster infrastructure can be fairly complex, so we would expect to have in AwsCluster.Status.Conditions a set condition types providing observation points for all the above steps, e.g. VPCReady, SubnetsReady, InternetGatewaysReady, etc.

For all the above conditions Status=True corresponds to the final state when the resource is provisioned and fully operational (same polarity); it is also important to notice that the elapsed time when those conditions have Status=False can be fairly long, so it is crucial to introduce a clean way to provide evidence about what is happening during those phases, e.g.

The provisioning is just proceeding (info)
The provisioning is not completed yet, but it is taking longer than expected (warning)
A recoverable error occurred during provisioning and someone/something should take action (warning)
A catastrophic error occurred (error)
The provisioning is completed, but for any reason, the resource is not operational (error)

This can be achieved by using different Reason and Message values, but this alone is not ideal, because, in order to understand the implications of each Reason code (is it info, a warning, or an error?), it might require a deep knowledge or provider internals; additionally, this forces condition consumers to depend on the Reason code enumeration, and this can lead to brittle solutions.

This problem was addressed by the introduction of the Severity field, which provides an explicit classification of Reason code, so the users or machines can immediately understand the current situation and act accordingly.

But, while having many provider-specific conditions in AwsCluster.Status.Conditions is definitely a remarkable improvement, at the same time this does not help in creating a consistent experience across providers, and it does not solve the problem of having a simple and intuitive view of the cluster infrastructure operational status in Cluster.Status.Conditions.

In order to solve this problem, the proposed solution is to:

Introduce a Ready condition in AwsCluster.Status.Conditions that summarizes the overall state of the current operational status for a cluster infrastructure for AWS.

Make the ClusterInfrastructureReady condition in Cluster.Status.Conditions to mirror the above one, or generalizing, to mirror the Ready condition from the infrastructure cluster object.

Both actions can be generalized and implemented in utility in CAPI; as a working assumption, e.g. the utility that generates summary of a list of conditions should apply the following rules:

Errors MUST surface immediately.
If there are no errors, Warnings MUST surface immediately.
The operation progress SHOULD be expressed in the form of step completed vs total steps to execute (details or possible alternatives TBD).

The cluster’s `ControlPlaneReady` condition

The condition of type Cluster.Status.ControlPlaneReady should provide an observation point on the operational state of the cluster control plane.

In order to get this condition in place, we are re-applying the same design patterns defined in the previous paragraph and re-using the "Summarize" and the "Mirror" strategy across the hierarchy of objects that defines the cluster control plane. Below the description of all the required steps:

A set of provider-specific conditions should be created in AwsMachine.Status.Conditions, e.g. InstanceReady, SecurityGroupsReady, LBAttachemenReady, BootstrapDataSecretDeletionSuccceded (the other infrastructure providers are expected to implement different conditions at this level)

A summary of the operational state of the machine infrastructure should be generated in AwsMachine.Status.Conditions[Ready]; this condition will be mirrored into Machine.Status.Conditions[InfrastructureReady].

A set of additional Machine.Status.Conditions should be created in order to provide an observation point on the operational state of kubeadm control-plane machine components like e.g. EtcdReady, ApiServerPodReady, etc. (the other control plane providers are expected to implement different conditions at this level)

A summary of the operational state of the control plane machine should be generated into Machine.Status.Conditions[Ready]; the aggregation of all the machine’s Ready conditions will be mirrored into KubeadmControlPlane.Status.Conditions[MachinesReady].

A set of additional KubeadmControlPlane.Status.Conditions will be created in order to provide an observation point on the operational state of the overall kubeadm control-plane specific processes, like e.g. ScalingUpSuccedeed, ScalingDownSuccedeed, MachineRemediationSuccedeed.

A summary of the operational state of the entire control plane should be generated into KubeadmControlPlane.Status.Conditions[Ready]; this condition will be mirrored into Cluster.Status.Conditions[ControlPlaneReady].

The cluster’s `WorkersReady` condition

The Cluster condition Cluster.Status.WorkersReady should provide an observation point on the operational state of all workers nodes (incl. Machines, MachineDeployments, MachineSets).

This can be achieved using the same design patterns defined in the previous paragraph and re-using the "Summarize" and the "Mirror" strategy; however, in this case, the implementation should consider that a cluster can have many MachineDeployments, MachinePools, etc.

Considering the complexity and to wait for more in-depth analysis and use-cases, the implementation of this Condition is deferred until a later stage.

The control plane upgrade workflow

To further validate the above design let’s consider another timeline representing the upgrade of a control plane:

Also in this case, we expect a simple and intuitive view of where a Cluster is with respect to this timeline, and we expect this should be provided by the condition of type ControlPlaneReady introduced in the previous paragraphs.

However, in order to address the specific use case, the following conditions should be added to KubeadmControlPlane.Status.Conditions: MachinesUpgradeSuccedeed, KubeProxyUpgradeSucceded, CoreDNSUpgradeSucceded. Those conditions represent a “run-to-completion” task, and since all of them are related to the same upgrade process, we are assuming to reset those conditions every time an upgrade starts.

Then, those new conditions will be then captured by the summary in KubeadmControlPlane.Status.Conditions[Ready] and be reflected to Cluster.Status.Conditions[ControlPlaneReady].

However, please note that during upgrades, some rules that are been used to evaluate the operational state of a control plane should be temporary changed e.g. during upgrades:

It is acceptable to have a number of replicas higher than the desired number of replicas
It is acceptable that one of the controlled machines is not fully operational while being provisioned.
It is acceptable that one of the controlled machines is becoming not operational while being deleted.

During the implementation phase, we will consider if to treat such exceptions as a special case or if to enhance the condition utilities to handle those situations in a generalized way.

Risks and Mitigations

Risk: This proposal aims to be consistent with the target state of conditions in Kubernetes, but this is still under definition (see KEP).
- Mitigation: Periodically re-evaluate this proposal vs the Kubernetes KEP.
Risk: Cluster API presents some specific challenges that are not common to the core Kubernetes objects.
- Mitigation: To allow a minimal set of carefully evaluated differences between Cluster API and Kubernetes conditions types.
- Mitigation: To define constraints and to provide utilities for dealing with the Cluster API object hierarchy.
Risk: This proposal allows for implementing conditions in incremental fashion, and this makes it complex to ensure a consistent approach across all objects.
- Mitigation: Ensure all the implementations comply with the defined set of constraints/design principles.
Risk: Having a consistent polarity ensures a simple and clear contract with the consumers, and it allows processing conditions in a simple and consistent way without being forced to implement specific logic for each condition type. However, we are aware about the fact that enforcing of consistent polarity (truthy) combined with the usage of recommended suffix for condition types can lead to verbal contortions to express conditions, especially in case of conditions designed to signal problems or in case of conditions that might exist or not.
- Mitigation: We are relaxing the rule about recommended suffix and allowing usage of custom suffix.
- Mitigation: We are recommending the condition adhere to the design principle to express the operational state of the component, and this should help in avoiding conditions name to surface internal implementation details.
- Mitigation: We should recommend condition implementers to clearly document the meaning of Unknown state, because as discussed also in the recent Kubernetes KEP about standardizing conditions, "Unknown" is a fact about the writer of the condition, and not a claim about the object.
- Mitigation: We should recommend developers of code relying on conditions to treat Unknown as a separated state vs assimilating it to True or False, because this can vary case by case and generate confusion in readers.
As a final consideration about the risk related to using a consistent polarity, it is important to notice that a consistent polarity ensure a clear meaning for True or o False states, which is already an improvement vs having different interpretations for all the three possible condition states.

Alternatives

Kubernetes Conditions

While designing this proposal it was considered how Kubernetes APIs implements .status.conditions in different objects, i.e.

Pods have a consistent set of conditions with positive polarity

 Type              Status
 Initialized       True
 Ready             True
 ContainersReady   True
 PodScheduled      True

Nodes instead have a mix of negative and positive polarity conditions

 Type             Status
 MemoryPressure   False
 DiskPressure     False
 PIDPressure      False
 Ready            True

Not only the polarity, but also the schema of condition types slightly changes between different types, and in order to fix this, there is a KEP that is trying to introduce a common Conditions type, as the first step for convergence about conditions usages and conditions types in Kubernetes.

This proposal is moving along the same lines of the Kubernetes KEP, with the following small differences as of to day.

In K8s the Type field is a string, while in this proposal is a string alias so we can enforce the definition of a well-defined set of ConditionType constants.
In K8s there is an ObservedGeneration field, while in this proposal not.
In this proposal there is an Severity field for providing a better classification of the different reasons, while in this K8s not.

Status field

In Kubernetes during the discussions about conditions one of the points usually discussed is the possibility of using status fields instead of conditions.

Within the context of this proposal, we are not considering this a viable option, mostly because status fields are object specific and this will fail the objective of creating a consistent UX for the users.

Upgrade Strategy

NA

Additional Details

Test Plan [optional]

TBD

Graduation Criteria [optional]

TBD

Version Skew Strategy [optional]

NA

Implementation History

2020-04-27: Compile a Google Doc following the CAEP template
2020-05-06: Create CAEP PR

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20200506-conditions.md

20200506-conditions.md

Conditions - Cluster status at glance

Table of Contents

Glossary

Summary

Motivation

Goals

Non-Goals/Future Work

Proposal

User Stories

Story 1

Story 2

Story 3

Story 4

Implementation Details/Notes/Constraints

Data Model Changes

Constraints

Condition semantic

The Ready condition

Controller changes

The cluster provisioning workflow

The `ClusterInfrastructureReady` condition

The cluster’s `ControlPlaneReady` condition

The cluster’s `WorkersReady` condition

The control plane upgrade workflow

Risks and Mitigations

Alternatives

Kubernetes Conditions

Status field

Upgrade Strategy

Additional Details

Test Plan [optional]

Graduation Criteria [optional]

Version Skew Strategy [optional]

Implementation History

Files

20200506-conditions.md

Latest commit

History

20200506-conditions.md

File metadata and controls

Conditions - Cluster status at glance

Table of Contents

Glossary

Summary

Motivation

Goals

Non-Goals/Future Work

Proposal

User Stories

Story 1

Story 2

Story 3

Story 4

Implementation Details/Notes/Constraints

Data Model Changes

Constraints

Condition semantic

The Ready condition

Controller changes

The cluster provisioning workflow

The ClusterInfrastructureReady condition

The cluster’s ControlPlaneReady condition

The cluster’s WorkersReady condition

The control plane upgrade workflow

Risks and Mitigations

Alternatives

Kubernetes Conditions

Status field

Upgrade Strategy

Additional Details

Test Plan [optional]

Graduation Criteria [optional]

Version Skew Strategy [optional]

Implementation History

The `ClusterInfrastructureReady` condition

The cluster’s `ControlPlaneReady` condition

The cluster’s `WorkersReady` condition