StackStorm 3.5 pre-release testing

[amanda11]

We're ready to prepare the StackStorm v3.5 release and start pre-release testing..

Release Process Preparation

Per Release Management Schedule @amanda11 is the Release Manager and @winem is Assisting for v3.5. They will freeze the master for the major repositories in StackStorm org, follow the StackStorm Release Process which is now available to public, accompanied by the Useful Info for Release managers. Communication is happening in #releasemgmt and #development Slack channels.
The first step is pre-release manual user-acceptance testing for v3.5dev.

Why Manual testing?

StackStorm is very serious about testing and has a lot of it:

• Linting, Compile, and Unit tests
• Integration tests
• User Interface tests
• Packaging tests
• Deployment Integrity checks
• Smoke tests
• end-to-end tests when automation spins up new AWS instance for each OS/flavor we support, installs real st2 like user would and runs set of st2tests (for each st2 PR, nightly, periodically, during release), including end-to-end tests ChatOps

See st2ci and st2cd for more examples and workflows about how StackStorm automation is used to test StackStorm (dogfooding).

That's a perfect way to verify what we already know and codify expectations about how StackStorm should function.

However it's not enough.
There are always new unknowns to discover, edge cases to experience and tests to add. Hence, manual Exploratory Testing is an exercise where entire team gathers together and starts trying (or breaking) new features before the new release. Because we're all different, perceive software differently and try different things we might find new bugs, improper design, oversights, edge cases and more.

This is how StackStorm previously managed to land less major/critical bugs into production.

TL;DR

curl -sSL https://stackstorm.com/packages/install.sh | bash -s -- --user=st2admin --password=Ch@ngeMe --unstable

See the Testing Process, where it will walk you through:

• Spinning up a StackStorm instance using st2vagrant
• Running StackStorm's self-check script
• Running through the basic manual testing steps

Additionally, try to use that StackStorm instance as you normally would, maybe try to break it in new and interesting ways that you haven't tried before, and report any regressions found comparing to v3.4.

At this stage, the following installation methods for 3.5 are available for testing:

• vagrant
• one line bash installer
• manual installation instructions - https://docs.stackstorm.com/latest/
  Due to changes in O/S versions the ansible and puppet installers will be updated post-release.

Extra points for PR hotfixes, reporting entirely new bugs, and missing test cases!

Specific changes to test

• Test the web UI and the integrated flow UI - see instructions here
• Test install on each OS
  • Ubuntu 20.04
    • Manual
    • Automated bash installer
    • Run the self-verification script - see instructions here
  • Ubuntu 18.04
    • Manual
    • Automated Bash Installer
    • Run the self-verification script - see instructions here
  • EL 7
    • Manual
    • Automated Bash Installer
    • Run the self-verification script - see instructions here
  • EL 8
    • Manual
    • Automated Bash Installer
    • Run the self-verification script - see instructions here
• StackStorm upgrade from 3.4 to 3.5, following the Upgrade Instructions: https://docs.stackstorm.com/latest/install/upgrades.html#v3-5
  • Without optional data migration script
  • With optional data migration script - tested on smallish data set...
  • EL 7
  • EL 8
  • Ubuntu 18.04
• Major changes as detailed in next section...

If you have successful test results, please post a summary of what all you tested (OSes, what features you tested).

If you run into any bugs, please open them in the respective repositories and link to this issue from there. I will add them to the list at the bottom of this description.

If you have any issues running StackStorm or running the tests, please post down below.

Major changes

• New Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Support with MongoDB 4.4
• Removed support for Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial support
• Performance improvements, including database operations, json seralization, yaml parsing in CLI, WebUI
• Redis enabled as co-ordination backend by default
• NGINX default config updated to include TLS v1.3 (in addition to v1.2)
• Upgrade to node 14 for st2chatops
• Ability to retrieve more than one resource with st2 get commands, see Allow user to retrieve more than one resource using "st2 resource get" CLI command st2#4912
• Support for task retry and task delay in Workflow Designer UI

Full Changelog

Changes which are recommended to ack, explore, check and try in a random way.

st2

Added

• Added web header settings for additional security hardening to nginx.conf: X-Frame-Options,
  Strict-Transport-Security, X-XSS-Protection and server-tokens. #5183

  Contributed by @Shital.

• Added support for limit and offset argument to the list_values data store
  service method (#5097 and #5171).

  Contributed by @anirudhbagri.

• Various additional metrics have been added to the action runner service to provide for better
  operational visibility. (improvement) #4846

  Contributed by @Kami.

• Added sensor model to list of JSON schemas auto-generated by make schemasgen that can be used
  by development tools to validate pack contents. (improvement)

• Added the command line utility st2-validate-pack that can be used by pack developers to
  validate pack contents. (improvement)

• Fix a bug in the API and CLI code which would prevent users from being able to retrieve resources
  which contain non-ascii (utf-8) characters in the names / references. (bug fix) #5189

  Contributed by @Kami.

• Fix a bug in the API router code and make sure we return correct and user-friendly error to the
  user in case we fail to parse the request URL / path because it contains invalid or incorrectly
  URL encoded data.

  Previously such errors weren't handled correctly which meant original exception with a stack
  trace got propagated to the user. (bug fix) #5189

  Contributed by @Kami.

• Make redis the default coordinator backend.

• Fix a bug in the pack config loader so that objects covered by an additionalProperties schema
  can use encrypted datastore keys and have their default values applied correctly. #5225

  Contributed by @cognifloyd.

• Add new database.compressors and database.zlib_compression_level config option which
  specifies compression algorithms client supports for network / transport level compression
  when talking to MongoDB.

  Actual compression algorithm used will be then decided by the server and depends on the
  algorithms which are supported by the server + client.

  Possible / valid values include: zstd, zlib. Keep in mind that zstandard (zstd) is only supported
  by MongoDB >= 4.2.

  Our official Debian and RPM packages bundle zstandard dependency by default which means
  setting this value to zstd should work out of the box as long as the server runs
  MongoDB >= 4.2. #5177

  Contributed by @Kami.

• Add support for compressing the payloads which are sent over the message bus. Compression is
  disabled by default and user can enable it by setting messaging.compression config option
  to one of the following values: zstd, lzma, bz2, gzip.

  In most cases we recommend using zstd (zstandard) since it offers best trade off between
  compression ratio and number of CPU cycles spent for compression and compression.

  How this will affect the deployment and throughput is very much user specific (workflow and
  resources available). It may make sense to enable it when generic action trigger is enabled
  and when working with executions with large textual results. #5241

  Contributed by @Kami.

• Mask secrets in output of an action execution in the API if the action has an output schema
  defined and one or more output parameters are marked as secret. #5250

  Contributed by @mahesh-orch.

Changed

• All the code has been refactored using black and black style is automatically enforced and
  required for all the new code. (#5156)

  Contributed by @Kami.

• Default nginx config (conf/nginx/st2.conf) which is used by the installer and Docker
  images has been updated to only support TLS v1.2 and TLS v1.3 (support for TLS v1.0 and v1.1
  has been removed).

  Keep in mind that TLS v1.3 will only be used when nginx is running on more recent distros
  where nginx is compiled against OpenSSL v1.1.1 which supports TLS 1.3. #5183 #5216

  Contributed by @Kami and @Shital.

• Add new -x argument to the st2 execution get command which allows
  result field to be excluded from the output. (improvement) #4846

• Update st2 execution get <id> command to also display execution log attribute which
  includes execution state transition information.

  By default end_timestamp attribute and duration attribute displayed in the command
  output only include the time it took action runner to finish running actual action, but it
  doesn't include the time it it takes action runner container to fully finish running the
  execution - this includes persisting execution result in the database.

  For actions which return large results, there could be a substantial discrepancy - e.g.
  action itself could finish in 0.5 seconds, but writing data to the database could take
  additional 5 seconds after the action code itself was executed.

  For all purposes until the execution result is persisted to the database, execution is
  not considered as finished.

  While writing result to the database action runner is also consuming CPU cycles since
  serialization of large results is a CPU intensive task.

  This means that "elapsed" attribute and start_timestamp + end_timestamp will make it look
  like actual action completed in 0.5 seconds, but in reality it took 5.5 seconds (0.5 + 5 seconds).

  Log attribute can be used to determine actual duration of the execution (from start to
  finish). (improvement) #4846

  Contributed by @Kami.

• Various internal improvements (reducing number of DB queries, speeding up YAML parsing, using
  DB object cache, etc.) which should speed up pack action registration between 15-30%. This is
  especially pronounced with packs which have a lot of actions (e.g. aws one).
  (improvement) #4846

  Contributed by @Kami.

• Underlying database field type and storage format for the Execution, LiveAction,
  WorkflowExecutionDB, TaskExecutionDB and TriggerInstanceDB database models has
  changed.

  This new format is much faster and efficient than the previous one. Users with larger executions
  (executions with larger results) should see the biggest improvements, but the change also scales
  down so there should also be improvements when reading and writing executions with small and
  medium sized results.

  Our micro and end to benchmarks have shown improvements up to 15-20x for write path (storing
  model in the database) and up to 10x for the read path.

  To put things into perspective - with previous version, running a Python runner action which
  returns 8 MB result would take around ~18 seconds total, but with this new storage format, it
  takes around 2 seconds (in this context, duration means the from the time the execution was
  scheduled to the time the execution model and result was written and available in the database).

  The difference is even larger when working with Orquesta workflows.

  Overall performance improvement doesn't just mean large decrease in those operation timings, but
  also large overall reduction of CPU usage - previously serializing large results was a CPU
  intensive time since it included tons of conversions and transformations back and forth.

  The new format is also around 10-20% more storage efficient which means that it should allows
  for larger model values (MongoDB document size limit is 16 MB).

  The actual change should be fully opaque and transparent to the end users - it's purely a
  field storage implementation detail and the code takes care of automatically handling both
  formats when working with those object.

  Same field data storage optimizations have also been applied to workflow related database models
  which should result in the same performance improvements for Orquesta workflows which pass larger
  data sets / execution results around.

  Trigger instance payload field has also been updated to use this new field type which should
  result in lower CPU utilization and better throughput of rules engine service when working with
  triggers with larger payloads.

  This should address a long standing issue where StackStorm was reported to be slow and CPU
  inefficient with handling large executions.

  If you want to migrate existing database objects to utilize the new type, you can use
  st2common/bin/migrations/v3.5/st2-migrate-db-dict-field-values migration
  script. (improvement) #4846

  Contributed by @Kami.

• Add new result_size field to the ActionExecutionDB model. This field will only be
  populated for executions which utilize new field storage format.

  It holds the size of serialzed execution result field in bytes. This field will allow us to
  implement more efficient execution result retrieval and provide better UX since we will be
  able to avoid loading execution results in the WebUI for executions with very large results
  (which cause browser to freeze). (improvement) #4846

  Contributed by @Kami.

• Add new /v1/executions/<id>/result[?download=1&compress=1&pretty_format=1] API endpoint
  which can be used used to retrieve or download raw execution result as (compressed) JSON file.

  This endpoint will primarily be used by st2web when executions produce very large results so
  we can avoid loading, parsing and formatting those very large results as JSON in the browser
  which freezes the browser window / tab. (improvement) #4846

  Contributed by @Kami.

• Update jinja2 dependency to the latest stable version (2.11.3). #5195

• Update pyyaml dependency to the latest stable version (5.4). #5207

• Update various dependencies to latest stable versions (bcrypt, appscheduler, pytz,
  python-dateutil, psutil, passlib, gunicorn, flex, cryptography.
  eventlet, greenlet, webob , mongoengine, pymongo, requests,
  pyyaml, kombu, amqp, python-ldap).

  #5215, Upgrade python-ldap to latest stable version st2-auth-ldap#94

  Contributed by @Kami.

• Update code and dependencies so it supports Python 3.8 and Mongo DB 4.4 #5177

  Contributed by @nzloshm @winem @Kami.

• StackStorm Web UI (st2web) has been updated to not render and display execution results
  larger than 200 KB directly in the history panel in the right side bar by default anymore.
  Instead a link to view or download the raw result is displayed.

  Execution result widget was never optimized to display very large results (especially for
  executions which return large nested dictionaries) so it would freeze and hang the whole
  browser tab / window when trying to render / display large results.

  If for some reason you want to revert to the old behavior (this is almost never a good idea
  since it will cause browser to freeze when trying to display large results), you can do that by
  setting max_execution_result_size_for_render option in the config to a very large value (e.g.
  max_execution_result_size_for_render: 16 * 1024 * 1024).

  Don't display and render large execution results, fix lint gulp task and lint violations, use latest up to date docker compose setup for e2e tests st2web#868

  Contributed by @Kami.

• Some of the config option registration code has been refactored to ignore "option already
  registered" errors. That was done as a work around for an occasional race in the tests and
  also to make all of the config option registration code expose the same consistent API. #5234

  Contributed by @Kami.

• Update pyywinrm dependency to the latest stable version (0.4.1). #5212

  Contributed by @chadpatt .

• Monkey patch on st2stream earlier in flow #5240

  Contributed by Amanda McGuinness (@amanda11 Ammeon Solutions)

• Support % in CLI arguments by reading the ConfigParser() arguments with raw=True.

  This removes support for '%' interpolations on the configuration arguments.

  See https://docs.python.org/3.8/library/configparser.html#configparser.ConfigParser.get for
  further details. #5253

  Contributed by @winem.

• Remove duplicate host header in the nginx config for the auth endpoint.

• Update orquesta to v1.4.0.

Improvements

• CLI has been updated to use or orjson when parsing API response and C version of the YAML
  safe dumper when formatting execution result for display. This should result in speed up when
  displaying execution result (st2 execution get, etc.) for executions with large results.

  When testing it locally, the difference for execution with 8 MB result was 18 seconds vs ~6
  seconds. (improvement) #4846

  Contributed by @Kami.

• Update various Jinja functiona to utilize C version of YAML safe_{load,dump} functions and
  orjson for better performance. (improvement) #4846

  Contributed by @Kami.

• For performance reasons, use udatetime library for parsing ISO8601 / RFC3339 date strings
  where possible. (improvement) #4846

  Contributed by @Kami.

• Speed up service start up time by speeding up runners registration on service start up by
  re-using existing stevedore ExtensionManager instance instead of instantiating new
  DriverManager instance per extension which is not necessary and it's slow since it requires
  disk / pkg resources scan for each extension. (improvement) #5198

  Contributed by @Kami.

• Add new ?max_result_size query parameter filter to the GET /v1/executiond/<id> API
  endpoint.

  This query parameter allows clients to implement conditional execution result retrieval and
  only retrieve the result field if it's smaller than the provided value.

  This comes handy in the various client scenarios (such as st2web) where we don't display and
  render very large results directly since it allows to speed things up and decrease amount of
  data retrieved and parsed. (improvement) #5197

  Contributed by @Kami.

• Update default nginx config which is used for proxying API requests and serving static
  content to only allow HTTP methods which are actually used by the services (get, post, put,
  delete, options, head).

  If a not-allowed method is used, nginx will abort the request early and return 405 status
  code. #5193

  Contributed by @ashwini-orchestral

• Update default nginx config which is used for proxying API requests and serving static
  content to not allow range requests. #5193

  Contributed by @ashwini-orchestral

• Drop unused python dependencies: prometheus_client, python-gnupg, more-itertools, zipp. #5228

  Contributed by @cognifloyd.

• Update majority of the "resource get" CLI commands (e.g. st2 execution get,
  st2 action get, st2 rule get, st2 pack get, st2 apikey get, st2 trace get,
  st2 key get, st2 webhook get, st2 timer get, etc.) so they allow for retrieval
  and printing of information for multiple resources using the following notation:
  st2 <resource> get <id 1> <id 2> <id n>, e.g. st2 action.get pack.show packs.get packs.delete

  This change is fully backward compatible when retrieving only a single resource (aka single
  id is passed to the command).

  When retrieving a single source the command will throw and exit with non-zero if a resource is
  not found, but when retrieving multiple resources, command will just print an error and
  continue with printing the details of any other found resources. (new feature) #4912

  Contributed by @Kami.

Fixed

• Refactor spec_loader util to use yaml.load with SafeLoader. (security)
  Contributed by @ashwini-orchestral

• Import ABC from collections.abc for Python 3.10 compatibility. (#5007)
  Contributed by @tirkarthi

• Updated to use virtualenv 20.4.0/PIP20.3.3 and fixate-requirements to work with PIP 20.3.3 #512
  Contributed by Amanda McGuinness (@amanda11 Ammeon Solutions)

• Fix st2 execution get --with-schema flag. (bug fix) #4846

  Contributed by @Kami.

• Fix SensorTypeAPI schema to use class_name instead of name since documentation for pack
  development uses class_name and registrar used to load sensor to database assign class_name
  to name in the database model. (bug fix)

• Updated paramiko version to 2.7.2, to go with updated cryptography to prevent problems
  with ssh keys on remote actions. #5201

  Contributed by Amanda McGuinness (@amanda11 Ammeon Solutions)

• Update rpm package metadata and fix Provides section for RHEL / CentOS 8 packages.

  In the previous versions, RPM metadata would incorrectly signal that the st2 package
  provides various Python libraries which it doesn't (those Python libraries are only used
  internally for the package local virtual environment).

  Speed up builds by caching /tmp/wheelhouse directory, speed up EL 8 build step by not running slow Requires / Provides Python generation step st2-packages#697

  Contributed by @Kami.

• Make sure st2common.util.green.shell.run_command() doesn't leave stray / zombie processes
  laying around in some command timeout scenarios. #5220

  Contributed by @r0m4n-z.

• Fix support for skipping notifications for workflow actions. Previously if action metadata
  specified an empty list for notify parameter value, that would be ignored / not handled
  correctly for workflow (orquesta, action chain) actions. #5221 #5227

  Contributed by @khushboobhatia01.

• Clean up to remove unused methods in the action execution concurrency policies. #5268

st2web

Changed

• If User is inactive for longer time the user should get logout from application
• Update dependencies
• logout action should logout user from all tabs
• Fix integer overview issue when the limit or timeout parameter values were entered beyond the maximum value
• Don't display and render large execution results
• Fix all the various lint violations detected by eslint.
  ###Added
• Added Delay Property as a new field under task properties.
• Added Retry Feature as a new field under task properties.
• Add focal support
• Set maxLength attribute for username and password for input validation

Removed

• Remove xenial support

orquesta 1.4.0

Changed

• Migrate from Travis to Github Actions. (improvement)

Fixed

• Fix unreachable join when an inbound task fails as defined in the task transition. (bug fix)
• Throw exception if the workflow definition that is written in YAML contains duplicate keys (i.e. task name). (bug fix)

st2chatops

Changed

• Updated to node 14
• Update dependencies

Added

• added Focal support

Removed

• Remove Xenial support

Conclusion

Please report findings here and bugs/regressions in respective repositories.
Depending on severity and importance bugs might be fixed before the release or postponed to the next release if they're very minor and not a release blocker.

Issues Found During Release

• TLS versions not updated - upgrade instructions updated
• Packs with duplicate keys won't load - upgrade notes updated
• Data migration scripts not available
• slack pack doesn't install on focal - due to dependencies that do not support python 3.8 - [WIP] Update lxml and slackclient to versions that supports python 3.8 StackStorm-Exchange/stackstorm-slack#72

PRs Merged for Release

• Further upgrade info st2docs#1077
• Remove EWC reference and further upgrade info st2docs#1078
• Add missing setup.py entry for the new migration script st2#5291

TODOs

• Blog post for release
• Blog post for exchange/community update

[amanda11]

Successfully tested st2 3.5dev on EL7 & EL8 on vagrant, with the self-check and manual Web testing.

[winem]

(I confused my Github accounts and deleted the comment from my other one, mweinberg-cm.)

Successfully tested st2 3.5dev on U18 & U20 in vagrant and the oneline-installer on U20 successfully.

[amanda11]

Tested:

• Upgrade on EL8 from 3.4->3.5 without using the data migration script.
• Using workflow UI to create a workflow with task retry and task delay parameters
• Chatops still working with slack following upgrade

Problem found: upgrade doesn't update nginx st2.conf so don't get the TLS upgrade. Generating a doc PR to mention steps to configure this, and also that /etc st2.conf on EL won't get updated on package update, and on Ubuntu you get asked what to do.

Also finding a problem with aws pack when reload config after upgrade due to duplicate key "headers". After upgrade, running:
st2ctl reload --register-all
will complain if any installed actions have duplicate parameters.

Will add a note to upgrade_notes (StackStorm/st2docs#1077)
Issue raised on AWS pack: StackStorm-Exchange/stackstorm-aws#114

[cognifloyd]

Also finding a problem with aws pack when reload config after upgrade due to duplicate key "headers". After upgrade, running:
st2ctl reload --register-all
will complain if any installed actions have duplicate parameters.

Background:

@blag mentioned that issue in slack (#exchange) on May 25th https://stackstorm-community.slack.com/archives/C01GD259JMP/p1621963277006700

A recent change in Orquesta has uncovered a few bugs in Exchange packs. In increasing order of difficulty…

The LastLine pack:
1 https://github.com/StackStorm-Exchange/stackstorm-lastline/blob/master/actions/submit_url.yaml
The verify key is duplicated in that file. The bugfix would be to remove it. That’s an easy bug to fix if somebody would like to take it on.

The FreeIPA pack:
https://github.com/StackStorm-Exchange/stackstorm-freeipa/blob/master/actions/env.yaml
There are two server keys in that file, and we need to figure out which one to remove.

The AWS pack:
https://github.com/StackStorm-Exchange/stackstorm-aws/blob/master/actions/apigateway_test_invoke_authorizer.yaml
There are two headers keys in that file, and we need to figure out which one to remove. This could be as simple as regenerating the actions, but it can turn into a rabbit hole.

I believe he noticed these issues due to exchange CI failures, so only 3 exchange packs should have this issue: LastLine, FreeIPA, and AWS.

There are actually 2 PRs involved:

• orquesta: Add constructor in YAML SafeLoader to check duplicate keys orquesta#230
• st2: Refactor spec_loader to use yaml.load with SafeLoader st2#5162

The orquesta change showed how to register the UniqueKeyLoader so that it is always used.

The st2 change used that same method so that all yaml files will be loaded with the UniqueKeyLoader. UniqueKeyLoader was only used for loading the openapi specs before the st2 change. So, failing to register actions was an unexpected behavioral change caused by that st2 PR.

[amanda11]

Thanks - I've raised issues on the 3 packs with "help wanted" label, and identifying them as incompatible at moment with 3.5.

[amanda11]

On upgraded El8 tested editing workflows from examples that had retry/delay in, all ok. Created new workflows with retry and delay in ok.

[amanda11]

Issue found on attempting upgrade with migration script - /opt/stackstorm/st2/bin/st2-migrate-db-dict-field-values isn't present on system after upgrading packages or on install.
We seem to be missing code that picks up the version specific migration scripts to include in the bin directory.

[amanda11]

Seeing problems installing slack pack on focal, due to complaints about libxml. No issues on EL8 or bionic. Might be to do with hardcoding of version of libxml in pack, rather than anything to do with st2 itself.
Other packs install fine.

[amanda11]

Currently validating a manual install of single node on EL8. Install went fine, just a minor doc change PR raised as found mention of ewc: StackStorm/st2docs#1078.
Need to do some more validation checks but all good so far...