"Updated" timestamps store the Wrong Thing

[Zane Bitter]

We treat the "Update Time" as a "modification time". In the cfn API, the "Update Time" is actually supposed to be the last time an Update was done on the resource/stack (analagous to the "Create Time"), not the last time the object in the database was updated.

The modification time doesn't seem like a useful thing to have, so we should just use that field for the Update time. Bonus: there would probably no longer be any worries about having cached an old value (which prompted the code that caused bug #1193132).

[Zane Bitter (zaneb)]

No activity for 6 months, so reassigned to nobody so that someone might pick it up.

[andersonvom (andersonvom)]

Do we have an expected behavior for the following scenario?
- a stack has been created, but no update was issued. What's the updated_time?

IMO, this should be set to None and should be displayed as such, but it could be argued that this value should be the same as created_time for this specific case.

Any comments?

[Steven Hardy (shardy)]

IMO the updated time should be the same as the created time in that scenario

[Randall Burt (randall-burt)]

IMO, if we take Zane's argument that the "Updated Time" should reflect the last time a stack-update was successful, then it should be empty/none if that's never happened. We should probably mimic the CFN behavior, though at least for the CFN format/api. I don't have issues if this behavior is mirrored in Native/HOT, just to keep things simple.

[Zane Bitter (zaneb)]

I agree with Randall. It should be None in the DB. In the heat-cfn-api at least, it should be filtered out of the data returned to the user when it is None, because that's how CloudFormation works. In the native API we have the choice of explicitly reporting it as None/nil or filtering it out. I think I would marginally prefer the former, but do whatever is easier.

[OpenStack Infra (hudson-openstack)]

Fix proposed to branch: master
Review: https://review.openstack.org/76644

[OpenStack Infra (hudson-openstack)]

Reviewed: https://review.openstack.org/74519
Committed: https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/heat/commit/?id=ce690963e71e39eb9fd03377f420ff208aa7e3ed
Submitter: Jenkins
Branch: master

commit ce690963e71e39eb9fd03377f420ff208aa7e3ed
Author: Richard Lee <email address hidden>
Date: Tue Feb 18 16:46:31 2014 -0500

    Change Stack timestamps to save correct info

    Stack.updated_time is currently being treated as modification time of
    the object in the database. Since it's not a very useful thing to have
    and the CFN API treats this value as "the last time an update call was
    issued", it makes sense to have the same behavior here as well.

    This changes the current real-time retrieval of created_time and
    updated_time in favor of the attributes already present in the stack and
    changes the information stored in these two fields to be the time the
    stack was created and the time the stack was last updated by the user,
    respectively.

    Co-Authored-By: Anderson Mesquita <email address hidden>
    Closes-Bug: #1193269
    Change-Id: I1fd6586b827b3f2babb5af5c85f9de25da74fbb6

[OpenStack Infra (hudson-openstack)]

Reviewed: https://review.openstack.org/76644
Committed: https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/heat/commit/?id=cc1d2dddfbf6dbf57c2e836faa8b2b26433723dc
Submitter: Jenkins
Branch: master

commit cc1d2dddfbf6dbf57c2e836faa8b2b26433723dc
Author: Anderson Mesquita <email address hidden>
Date: Wed Feb 26 15:24:17 2014 -0500

    Change Resource timestamps to save correct info

    Resource.updated_time is currently being treated as modification time
    of the object in the database. Since it's not a very useful thing to
    have and the CFN API treats this value as "the last time an update
    call was issued", it makes sense to have the same behavior here as
    well.

    This changes the current real-time retrieval of created_time and
    updated_time in favor of the attributes already present in the
    resource and changes the information stored in these two fields to be
    the time the resource was created and the time the resource was last
    updated by the user, respectively.

    Co-Authored-By: Richard Lee <email address hidden>
    Related-Bug: #1193269
    Change-Id: Iad689b97d237fa63856b878827a1fcb1676c991c

[Steven Hardy (shardy)]

An interesting side-effect of this, it transpires, is that it's impossible to determine the time when a stack update started, ref bug #1448155, which makes filtering for events which happened since the current in-progress action started very difficult.