[RFE] rename applications

[Andrea Ieri]

Sometimes application names that seem sensible at one time, might appear suboptimal at a later date. For long-lived clouds, this risk is of course enhanced.

It would be nice to have a way to rename an application without having to redeploy it, which can in many cases be overkill.

[Andrey Grebennikov (agrebennikov)]

This is also helpful in the case when it is required to establish cross-model relations and offer the remote service, while the existing cloud already contains the app with the same name.

[Harry Pidcock (hpidcock)]

The problem we have is to do with kubernetes, since resources are named using the application name, a rename would require renaming everything, otherwise the old name can't be used again. More issues would arise in Kubernetes with the naming of storage, by renaming, we would need to still match the old PVs, which is hard since the application name has changed.

I doubt this will ever happen sadly, application name is crucial currently to how deployed applications are managed.

[Haw Loeung (hloeung)]

For kubernetes, it's usually short lived and we can redeploy applications together with new pods in it's place then have the ingress in front switch over.

I think this would be useful for non-k8s models. Any chance we can reconsider this?

[Ian Booth (wallyworld)]

With comment #1 and cross model relations, can you clarify whether you are talking about the offering side or the consuming side? On the consuming side, say you already have deployed a postgresql application but you want to relate to a postgresql offer in a different model; you can first consume the offer and give it an alias, and then relate to it, eg

juju consume ctrl:othermodel.postgresql mypostgresql
juju relate someapp mypostgresql

On the offering side, you can call the offer whatever you want to avoid name clashes.

I may be misunderstanding your use case though....