Review technical debt in repo and determine nearterm improvements

[izgeri]

Review this repo:

• Determine whether improvements can be made to update/modernize the release process
• Review README and CONTRIBUTING to determine if either documentation set is missing important information
• Determine if automated test suite should be augmented to alert maintainer team to possible breakages earlier
• Determine what sorts of standard maintenance tasks this repo requires. Does it need regular review to update the Terraform version used in the integration tests? Are there other dependencies (eg Golang?) that should be updated at regular intervals?
• Determine whether any additional updates should be slated for work soon, including potential feature requests logged in GitHub issues (for small changes, we can work into backlog - for larger changes that take greater than one standard 2-3 day PR cycle, we will raise with PM)

The output of this spike will be a list of items for each category above listed in a comment on this issue, and linking to the GitHub issues for each item.

[sgnn7]

Things that need fixing in the order of importance:

• Many variables cannot be set in the .tf files (unverified) (Many provider attributes are not supported #29)
• Goreleaser creates bad brew recipe links (Goreleaser does not create the proper brew URLs #47)
• Documentation is pretty crude and is making up for some suboptimal deployment patterns (Clean up README #49)
• Version of the plugin is missing (No version is available #30)
• Stale golang modules (All dependency modules should be updated #50)
• No good way to notice issues with terraform dependencies upstream (Automate notification of upstream dependency failures #51)
• Build infra is moderately out of date (gitlab config, no GH actions, no auto-release, etc) (Move build infra to GitHub actions #52)
• No instructions for Windows deployment and no Windows examples (Add Windows instructions to README #53)
• EE tests use cuke-master base image (Update/fix docker-compose files #54)
• OSS tests use ancient container config (Update/fix docker-compose files #54)
• Various misc documentation cleanups (Clean up README #49)

[izgeri]

Organizing these improvements into the categories I listed above (which is my draft of what we'll use for all of these projects):

Improvements to release process

• Goreleaser creates bad brew recipe links (Goreleaser does not create the proper brew URLs #47)

Repo documentation improvements

• Documentation is pretty crude and is making up for some suboptimal deployment patterns (Clean up README #49)
• No instructions for Windows deployment and no Windows examples (Add Windows instructions to README #53)
• Various misc documentation cleanups (Clean up README #49)

Test suite improvements (in particular, tests to add to alert us early to breakages)

• No good way to notice issues with terraform dependencies upstream (Automate notification of upstream dependency failures #51)
• Build infra is moderately out of date (gitlab config, no GH actions, no auto-release, etc) (Move build infra to GitHub actions #52)
• EE tests use cuke-master base image (Update/fix docker-compose files #54)
• OSS tests use ancient container config (Update/fix docker-compose files #54)

Repo standard maintenance tasks

• Stale golang modules (All dependency modules should be updated #50)

Enhancement requests to consider

• Version of the plugin is missing (No version is available #30)

Bugs

• Many variables cannot be set in the .tf files (unverified) (Many provider attributes are not supported #29)

Thanks @sgnn7 for gathering this info :) can you also please comment here whether updating golang modules / updating terraform or conjur/DAP versions in tests is part of required regular maintenance?

[sgnn7]

can you also please comment here whether updating golang modules / updating terraform or conjur/DAP versions in tests is part of required regular maintenance?

yes - this should be done when needed. we depend on both conjur-api-go and terraform modules so updates there will require us to ensure that we are up to date with them otherwise we will risk having a broken release.

[sgnn7]

Updated the list and crossed out any currently-released fixes

[izgeri]

Thanks @sgnn7! I think this issue can be closed for now, we can keep it as a record of our evaluation but all follow-up issues have been logged now.