Contract validation utility

[richardcase]

What would you like to be added (User Story)?

As a provider implementor, I want a utility that validates my resource kinds against a contract, so that i know my implementation adheres to the relevant CAPI contract.

Detailed Description

When implementing a provider, it's required that CRD contain certain fields to adhere to the contract for the specific provider type. There are docs that detail the contract fields (like this for InfraCluster) but there is no automated way to determine if the CRD actually adheres to the contract.

Its proposed that we create a utility that does the following:

• Validates a CRD against a specific contract definition
• Generates contract documentation for a specific contract definition

This will require that contracts are declared in some way and that this is kept up to date when the contract changes.

Anything else you would like to add?

No response

Label(s) to be applied

/kind feature
One or more /area label. See https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api/labels?q=area for the list of labels.

[richardcase]

/assign
/lifecycle active

[richardcase]

I have started working on this and have a proof-of-concept working.

[sbueringer]

Just wanted to mention that most of our contracts are a combination of a specific API field but also of corresponding behavior.

I assume only the first part is in scope here?

[fabriziopandini]

We already talked in the past about "CAPI conformance", this goes in the same direction.

FYI we have the /internal/contract package that we are using to consume CRDs from providers according to what is defined in the contract. I'm not sure this is exactly what you are looking for, but finding a way to avoid duplications seems important for long term maintainability

[richardcase]

Thanks @fabriziopandini, i'll have a look at that as well and see if there is any duplication.