Removal of paused clusters or namespace containing it get stuck

[pedjak]

trafficstars

/kind bug

What steps did you take and what happened:

• Create a cluster with: clusterctl generate cluster foo --kubernetes-version=1.26.0 | kubectl apply -f -
• Pause AWSCluster foo instance by adding cluster.x-k8s.io/paused annotation to it
• Try to remove either the whole namespace of just AWSCluster instance using kubectl delete awscluster foo - it hangs there forever

An user should be very surprised to discover that deletion of paused objects or higher order objects get stuck.

What did you expect to happen:

A paused resource should be removable, i.e. kubectl delete awscluster foo should remove the cluster.

Anything else you would like to add:

The controller returns very early when a cluster is paused, keeping the finalizer that blocks the deletion.

Environment:

• Cluster-api-provider-aws version: 2.2.4