Our previous mechanism for dealing with tainting relied on directly
mutating the InstanceState object to mark it as such. In our new state
models we consider the instance objects to be immutable by convention, and
so we frequently copy them. As a result, the taint flagging was no longer
making it all the way through the apply evaluation process.
Here we now implement tainting as a separate step in the evaluation
process, creating a copy of the object with a tainted status if there were
any errors during creation.
This introduces a new behavior where any provider-level errors during
creation will also cause an instance to be marked as tainted if any object
is returned at all. Create-time errors _normally_ result in no object at
all, but the provider might return an object if the failure occurred at
a subsequent step of a multi-step creation process and so left behind a
remote object that needs to be cleaned up on a future run.
Prior to our refactoring here, we were relying on a lucky coincidence for
correct behavior of the plan walk following a refresh in the same run:
- The refresh phase created placeholder objects in the state to represent
any resource instance pending creation, to allow the interpolator to
read attributes from them when evaluating "provider" and "data" blocks.
In effect, the refresh walk is creating a partial plan that only covers
creation actions, but was immediately discarding the actual diff entries
and storing only the planned new state.
- It happened that objects pending creation showed up in state with an
empty ID value, since that only gets assigned by the provider during
apply.
- The Refresh function concluded by calling terraform.State.Prune, which
deletes from the state any objects that have an empty ID value, which
therefore prevented these temporary objects from surviving into the
plan phase.
After refactoring, we no longer have this special ID field on instance
object state, and we instead rely on the Status field for tracking such
things. We also no longer have an explicit "prune" step on state, since
the state mutation methods themselves keep the structure pruned.
To address this, here we introduce a new instance object status "planned",
which is equivalent to having an empty ID value in the old world. We also
introduce a new method on states.SyncState that deletes from the state
any planned objects, which therefore replaces that portion of the old
State.prune operation just for this refresh use-case.
Finally, we are now expecting the expression evaluator to pull pending
objects from the planned changeset rather than from the state directly,
and so for correct results these placeholder resource creation changes
must also be reported in a throwaway changeset during the refresh walk.
The addition of states.ObjectPlanned also permits a previously-missing
safety check in the expression evaluator to prevent us from relying on the
incomplete value stored in state for a pending object, in the event that
some bug prevents the real pending object from being written into the
planned changeset.
Our state representation is not able to preserve unknown values, so it's
not suitable for retaining the transient incomplete values we produce
during planning.
Instead, we'll discard the unknown values when writing to state and have
the expression evaluator prefer an object from the plan where possible.
We still use the shape of the transient state to inform things like the
resource's "each mode", so the plan only masks the object values
themselves.
We're going to allow the provider to encode whatever it wants in here, so
a provider can use whatever is most convenient for its implementation
language and to avoid some of the bugs we saw with the prior model where
the forced round-trip through JSON and back into interface{} would cause
some loss of fidelity, leading to bugs.
Due to how often the state and plan types are referenced throughout
Terraform, there isn't a great way to switch them out gradually. As a
consequence, this huge commit gets us from the old world to a _compilable_
new world, but still has a large number of known test failures due to
key functionality being stubbed out.
The stubs here are for anything that interacts with providers, since we
now need to do the follow-up work to similarly replace the old
terraform.ResourceProvider interface with its replacement in the new
"providers" package. That work, along with work to fix the remaining
failing tests, will follow in subsequent commits.
The aim here was to replace all references to terraform.State and its
downstream types with states.State, terraform.Plan with plans.Plan,
state.State with statemgr.State, and switch to the new implementations of
the state and plan file formats. However, due to the number of times those
types are used, this also ended up affecting numerous other parts of core
such as terraform.Hook, the backend.Backend interface, and most of the CLI
commands.
Just as with 5861dbf3fc49b19587a31816eb06f511ab861bb4 before, I apologize
in advance to the person who inevitably just found this huge commit while
spelunking through the commit history.
The types here were originally written to allow us to defer decoding of
object values until schemas are available, but it turns out that this was
forcing us to defer decoding longer than necessary and potentially decode
the same value multiple times.
To avoid this, we create pairs of types to represent the encoded and
decoded versions and methods for moving between them. These types are
identical to one another apart from how the dynamic values are
represented.
Our previous state models in the "terraform" package had a few limitations
that are addressed here:
- Instance attributes were stored as map[string]string with dot-separated
keys representing traversals through a data structure. Now that we have
a full type system, it's preferable to store it as a real data
structure.
- The existing state structures skipped over the "resource" concept and
went straight to resource instance, requiring heuristics to decide
whether a particular resource should appear as a single object or as
a list of objects when used in configuration expressions.
- Related to the previous point, the state models also used incorrect
terminology where "ResourceState" was really a resource instance state
and "InstanceState" was really the state of a particular remote object
associated with an instance. These new models use the correct names for
each of these, introducing the idea of a "ResourceInstanceObject" as
the local record of a remote object associated with an instance.
This is a first pass at fleshing out a new model for state. Undoubtedly
there will be further iterations of this as we work on integrating these
new models into the "terraform" package.
These new model types no longer serve double-duty as a description of the
JSON state file format, since they are for in-memory use only. A
subsequent commit will introduce a separate package that deals with
persisting state to files and reloading those files later.
Paul Tyng