Hello Openwhisk community members, recently, PR #4390 [1] renamed runtime kind "java" to "java:8". While a change like this looks harmless at the first sight, it breaks all existing actions of this kind. This may not be important for developers and "occasional" usage of Openwhisk - but it affects production deployments. Production deployments with existing actions require additional migration steps when renaming or removing runtime kinds.
I opened PR #4627 to improve documentation. Said PR also adds "documentation" to the pre-defined Openwhisk runtime manifest files to make developers aware that renaming or removing runtime kinds can cause problems. There is another area that should be improved - but I need help to better understand this area... When trying to create an action with a kind that does not exist, a reasonable error message is created: $ wsk action create kind-does-not-exist tests/dat/actions/hello.js --kind nodejs:4 error: Unable to create action 'kind-does-not-exist': The request content was malformed: kind 'nodejs:4' not in Set(dotnet:2.2, go:1.11, nodejs:10, ballerina:0.990, ruby:2.5, nodejs:18, blackbox, swift:4.2, java:8, sequence, nodejs:6, nodejs:12, python:3, python:2, php:7.3) (code 33bfb55ce44d1dd0bc6e662c49ea9391) When trying to display an action's metadata which has a kind that does not exist, the resulting error message is not helpful at all: $ wsk action get kind-does-not-exist error: Unable to get action 'kind-does-not-exist': Resource by this name exists but is not in this collection. (code 4761468230c344417fd61cdca5922e52) * My conclusion from looking into controller log's and code is that deserialization of the ExecMetaDataBase object fails with a DeserializationException [3]. * This exception fails the "try" block in StoreUtils.deserialize() leading to a fall-back read in the "catch" block. This fall-back read seems to return a WhiskTrigger instead of a WhiskActionMetaData so that a DocumentTypeMismatchException is thrown [4]. The resulting message can be found in controller logs: "document type class org.apache.openwhisk.core.entity.WhiskTrigger did not match expected type class org.apache.openwhisk.core.entity.WhiskActionMetaData.". * As a result, getEntity() fails with the misleading error message mentioned above and HTTP status code 409 (Conflict). Can somebody explain why [4] has a fall-back and which scenarios are addressed by this? In our scenario, ExecMetaDataBase should probably throw an UnknownRuntimeKindException and StoreUtils.deserialize() should not have a fall-back for this exception. [1] https://github.com/apache/openwhisk/pull/4390 [2] https://github.com/apache/openwhisk/pull/4627 [3] https://github.com/apache/openwhisk/blob/2036548e62dbf959d91c2328e86318bd7cfa656f/common/scala/src/main/scala/org/apache/openwhisk/core/entity/Exec.scala#L445-L450 [4] https://github.com/apache/openwhisk/blob/2036548e62dbf959d91c2328e86318bd7cfa656f/common/scala/src/main/scala/org/apache/openwhisk/core/database/StoreUtils.scala#L58-L67 [5] https://github.com/apache/openwhisk/blob/be1e3a19c02956c9be85023a0bb0ff399c21444d/core/controller/src/main/scala/org/apache/openwhisk/core/controller/ApiUtils.scala#L148-L150 Mit freundlichen Grüßen / Regards, Sven Lange-Last Senior Software Engineer IBM Cloud Functions Apache OpenWhisk E-mail: sven.lange-l...@de.ibm.com Find me on: Schoenaicher Str. 220 Boeblingen, 71032 Germany IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH Vorsitzende des Aufsichtsrats: Martina Koederitz Geschäftsführung: Dirk Wittkopp Sitz der Gesellschaft: Böblingen / Registergericht: Amtsgericht Stuttgart, HRB 243294
