Expand automated testing to cover more k8s distributions and versions

[joe-kimmel-vmw]

Describe the problem/challenge you have Sometimes people run kapp-controller on something other than minikube. Weird, right? I thought this whole kubernetes thing was for turning developer laptops into space heaters during the winter months, and then in the summer we shed our winter coats and run applications on bare metal again? But anyways, whoever these people are running our tool in "the cloud", it turns out sometimes we have compatibility issues. In order to support all clouds of digital troposphere, from the noble cirrus to the humble cumulonimbus, we should test against them!

Describe the solution you'd like We should probably test against at least AWS and GC? There's something vaguely close to prior art in impgkg: https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/carvel-imgpkg/blob/develop/.github/workflows/gh-test-external-registry.yml#L59

Anything else you would like to add: Definitely related to the discussion in https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/carvel-kapp-controller/issues/352 in spirit, - at some point there's a matrix of kubernetes versions x kubernetes providers.

Likely a good first step on this issue would be to peel off a single deliverable, like "we'll test kubernetes 1.22 on Google Cloud"; this is intended more as an "epic" or "parent issue".

---

Vote on this request

This is an invitation to the community to vote on issues, to help us prioritize our backlog. Use the "smiley face" up to the right of this comment to vote.

👍 "I would like to see this addressed as soon as possible" 👎 "There are other more important things to focus on right now"

We are also happy to receive and review Pull Requests if you want to help working on this issue.

[benmoss]

I always try to push back on these types of requests, there's an element of "let's test our thing on every Intel processor to make sure we're compatible". Kubernetes is not quite the same as x86-64, but to some extent it is.

[danielhelfand]

One potential approach here is have a daily CI job that runs tests or examples on various k8s distributions like GKE/OpenShift. This way we have some level of coverage for kapp-controller in these environments but do not have to invest tons of time in maintaining this process.

Another thing that could be helpful for this issue is to understand more on where support requests are coming from (i.e. which distributions). This would help us better identify what to have covered by this process.