Kubernetes: validating update requests to custom resource

The Kubernetes docs on Custom Resources has a section on Advanced features and flexibility (never mind that validating requests should be considered a pretty basic feature 😉). For validation of CRDs, it says:

Most validation can be specified in the CRD using OpenAPI v3.0 validation. Any other validations supported by addition of a Validating Webhook.

The OpenAPI v3.0 validation won't help you accomplish what you're looking for, namely ensuring immutability of certain fields on your custom resource, it's only helpful for stateless validations where you're looking at one instance of an object and determining if it's valid or not, you can't compare it to a previous version of the resource and validate that nothing has changed.

You could use Validating Webhooks. It feels like a heavyweight solution, as you will need to implement a server that conforms to the Validating Webhook contract (responding to specific kinds of requests with specific kinds of responses), but you will have the required data at least to make the desired determination, e.g. knowing that it's an UPDATE request and knowing what the old object looked like. For more details, see here. I have not actually tried Validating Webhooks, but it feels like it could work.

An alternative approach I've used is to store the user-provided data within the Status subresource of the custom resource the first time it's created, and then always look at the data there. Any changes to the Spec are ignored, though your controller can notice discrepancies between what's in the Spec and what's in the Status, and embed a warning in the Status telling the user that they've mutated the object in an invalid way and their specified values are being ignored. You can see an example of that approach here and here. As per the relevant README section of that linked repo, this results in the following behaviour:

The AVAILABLE column will show false if the UAA client for the team has not been successfully created. The WARNING column will display a warning if you have mutated the Team spec after initial creation. The DIRECTOR column displays the originally provided value for spec.director and this is the value that this team will continue to use. If you do attempt to mutate the Team resource, you can see your (ignored) user-provided value with the -o wide flag:

$ kubectl get team --all-namespaces -owideNAMESPACE   NAME   DIRECTOR     AVAILABLE   WARNING   USER-PROVIDED DIRECTORtest        test   vbox-admin   true                  vbox-admin

If we attempt to mutate the spec.director property, here's what we will see:

$ kubectl get team --all-namespaces -owideNAMESPACE   NAME   DIRECTOR     AVAILABLE   WARNING                                              USER-PROVIDED DIRECTORtest        test   vbox-admin   true        API resource has been mutated; all changes ignored   bad-new-director-name