Documentation says uninstalling chart uninstalls CRDs, but it does not

[antoineozenne-at-leocare]

Version of Azure Service Operator
2.3.0

Describe the bug
When uninstalling the chart, the CRD are not uninstalled (contrary to what the documentation indicates).

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

• Install the chart with the following commands:

  kubectl create namespace azureserviceoperator-system --dry-run=client -o yaml | kubectl apply -f -
  helm upgrade --install --namespace azureserviceoperator-system azureserviceoperator-system aso2/azure-service-operator --version 2.3.0 --values myvalues.yaml

  The myvalues.yaml content is the following:

  azureSubscriptionID: xxx
  azureTenantID: xxx
  azureClientID: xxx
  useWorkloadIdentityAuth: true
  crdPattern: 'managedidentity.azure.com/*;authorization.azure.com/*'

• Deploy some resources.

• Delete these resources.

• Uninstall the chart with the following commands:

  helm uninstall --namespace azureserviceoperator-system azureserviceoperator-system
  kubectl delete namespace azureserviceoperator-system

• See the CRD are always here:

  kubectl api-resources | grep azure.com
  # roleassignments                                       authorization.azure.com/v1api20200801preview     true         RoleAssignment
  # federatedidentitycredentials                          managedidentity.azure.com/v1api20220131preview   true         FederatedIdentityCredential
  # userassignedidentities                                managedidentity.azure.com/v1beta20181130         true         UserAssignedIdentity

Expected behavior
All the CRD are uninstalled.

[theunrepentantgeek]

This is by design, both for Helm and for ASO.

The documentation for Helm reads:

There is no support at this time for upgrading or deleting CRDs using Helm. This was an explicit decision after much community discussion due to the danger for unintentional data loss.

With ASO, it's a little more complicated - the CRDs are not included with the chart at all.

So, even if Helm supported CRD removal, it wouldn't know about them, and wouldn't remove them.

ASO has so many CRDs that their total size is too large for Helm to manage. Instead the Operator installs and upgrades them itself (though you can take over this process yourself). See CRD Mangement in ASO for more information.

For similar reasons to Helm, minimizing risks, we have not built any functionality to automatically remove CRDs.

[theunrepentantgeek]

Let me know if you have any questions about this behaviour.

[antoineozenne-at-leocare]

Yes, thank you @theunrepentantgeek, the process you are describing seems usual to me. I think the documentation https://azure.github.io/azure-service-operator/guide/uninstalling/ needs a fix. This part misled me:

Warning: This command will also remove installed ASO CRDs. As mentioned above it is strongly recommended that you ensure that there are no remaining ASO resources in the cluster before you run this command.

[matthchr]

You are right @antoineozenne-at-leocare - that documentation is wrong!

I've updated the title of this issue and retagged it as a documentation issue, which we will fix.

[theunrepentantgeek]

Good catch @antoineozenne-at-leocare, we definitely need to fix our docs.