Audit KCP codebase for re-entrancy & error handling of non-key space operations

[fabriziopandini]

There was a few interesting thread about error management for etcd's non-key space operations.

• etcd Go & Java client SDK's retry mechanism may break Serializable etcd-io/etcd#18424 (comment)
• kubeadm's etcd client member add / remove can return errors but server side there could be success kubernetes/kubeadm#3111

As a first reaction, I think in KCP we are generally ok, because errors reported by etcd are usually handled by re-entracy, which implies we re-assess the current state of the world before deciding the course of action.

But this is also a good chance to audit the code base for when we use non-key space operations, mostly remove member and forward leadership.

NOTE: add member/join is a slight different case, because we rely on kubeadm for it.

PS. I classified this as a bug because I did know exactly which kind to use 😅, but to be clear we are not aware of bugs it this area and this issue is to double check our codebase is robust enough to handle edge cases described in the comment above.

[sbueringer]

Stupid question, non-key space operations are all operations that don't read/write a key/data?

[ahrtr]

non-key space operations are all operations that don't read/write a key/data?

YES.

[fabriziopandini]

Note: look also at how we handle errors in case kubeadm join fails and a there is member not started (without a name) sticking around

[k8s-triage-robot]

This issue is labeled with priority/important-soon but has not been updated in over 90 days, and should be re-triaged.
Important-soon issues must be staffed and worked on either currently, or very soon, ideally in time for the next release.

You can:

• Confirm that this issue is still relevant with /triage accepted (org members only)
• Deprioritize it with /priority important-longterm or /priority backlog
• Close this issue with /close

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/remove-triage accepted