Breaking Changes

We go to great lengths to avoid breaking changes as much as possible, as we’re well aware that they can cause issues for our users. However, they do occasionally occur, so we’ve committed to providing good documentation each time this occurs.

Upcoming Breaking Changes

Scheduled for v2.10.0

• The following properties on machinelearningservices.WorkspacesCompute will be marked as secrets: SslConfiguration.Key, SslConfiguration.Cert, VirtualMachineSshCredentials.PrivateKeyData, and VirtualMachineSshCredentials.PublicKeyData.
  We try to avoid breaking changes, but in this case, allowing raw keys in the spec is a security problem and as such we’ve decided to make a break to correct this issue.

Released Breaking Changes

2.9.0

Breaking changes are:

• DelegatedManagedIdentityResourceId is now a secret
• ContainerService version v1api20230202preview has been deleted

For more information see v2.9.0 Breaking Changes.

v2.8.0

Breaking changes are:

• ManagedCluster property .spec.properties.windowsProfile.adminPassword is now a SecretReference rather than a string
• Use “never” rather than "" to prevent syncing for AZURE_SYNC_PERIOD

For more information see v2.8.0 Breaking Changes.

v2.6.0

Breaking changes are:

• VirtualMachineScaleSet ProtectedSettings now a SecretReference

For more information see v2.6.0 Breaking Changes.

v2.4.0

Breaking changes are:

• Beta CRD versions have been removed

For more information see v2.4.0 Breaking Changes.

v2.2.0

Breaking changes are:

• ManagedClusters ManagedClusterServicePrincipalProfile.Secret field is now marked as a SecretReference
• Remove un-used Status properties

For more information see v2.2.0 Breaking Changes.

v2.1.0

Breaking changes are:

• The operator no longer installs CRDs by default.
• serviceoperator.azure.com/credential-from no longer supports secret references that are outside the namespace the resource is in
• Upgrades from releases prior to v2.0.0-beta.5 are still disallowed (same as v2.0.0)

For more information see v2.1.0 Breaking Changes.

v2.0.0

Breaking changes are:

• Upgrades from releases prior to v2.0.0-beta.5 are disallowed
• Alpha CRD versions have been removed
• Structure change for ResourceGroup status

For more information see v2.0.0 Breaking Changes.

v2.0.0-beta.4

In the v2.0.0-beta.4 release of Azure Service Operator (ASO) we pivoted to using Azure Swagger API Specifications as the sole source of truth for our code generator. This change brought with it a significant improvement in fidelity - the code we generate is now much closer to what the Azure Swagger API Specifications describe.

Unfortunately, this change also brings with it a number of breaking changes requiring simple manual modifications to pre-existing resources.

Breaking changes are:

• The discriminator value for polymorphic types has been changed to match the name of the property used to specify that option.
• Enumerated properties that previously had a base type but no enumeration values have been updated to include the enumeration values.
• Objects that were incorrectly generated as nested properties have been directly inlined
• ARM Id fields are now correctly identified as references, allowing linking to a resource in Kubernetes instead of only in Azure.
• Status properties that cannot be set by the end user on a Spec that were included in the Spec in error
• Sub-resources that were incorrectly inlined into the parent resource have been moved to a separate resource.
• Properties that previously included on Spec but actually had no function have been removed.
• Validation rules have been tightened, or added to properties that previously had no validation rules.

For detailed information, including an exhaustive list of all affected resource properties, see v2.0.0-beta.4 Breaking Changes.

Policies

We know that breaking changes are a problem for many of our users, so we’re making the following commitments to keep such things to a minimum.

No breaking changes to existing resource versions

We will not introduce a breaking change in an existing version of a resource such as v1api20230101.

In the case of such a change being forced upon us, we will take all reasonable steps to reduce the impact as far as possible.

The most likely cause of this will be a security issue that requires action - such as if we discover a password field that hasn’t been correctly flagged as a secret. There’s also a possibilty of a change ocurring upstream, but we consider this to be extremely unlikely because of the stringent API change criteria used by Azure.

Minimal breaking changes in new resource versions

We may introduce breaking changes between versions of resources, such as between v1api20230101 and v1api20230201. These two versions correspond to two different Azure API versions (that is, 2023-01-01 and 2023-02-01), and if the upstream Azure service introduces a breaking change in the newer of these two API versions we may pass that breaking change along.

Mitigation techniques

Automatic conversion: By manually augmenting the intra-version conversions produced by our code-generator, we may be able to automatically upgrade resources from the older version to the new. Migration would be zero-touch for our users.

We’ve done this before when a new version of a resource API introduced a breaking change, see managed_cluster_conversion_overrides.go.

Custom Tooling: For our v2.0.0 release, we provided a specialized tool (asoctl) specifically designed to smooth the way for upgrading users. In addition to the existing two modes, we may add further functions to cater for other scenarios.

For users upgrading from ASO v1, asoctl import azure-resource provides a way to scaffold an ASO v2 resource based on an existing Azure resource.

For clusters that once had an alpha release of ASO v2 installed, asoctl clean crds does the cleanup required to ensure the upgrade from v2.0.0-beta.5 to v2.0.0 goes smoothly.

We may, in future, create additional tooling designed to smooth the way for users encountering what would otherwise be breaking changes.

Documentation: As a last resort, if we have a breaking change that we can’t avoid (or can’t transparently mitigate), we’ll explicitly document it, both here and in the release notes for that version.