As described in the patch itself, there is a case that if a node is updated out of
band (e.g. node-problem-detector (https://github.com/kubernetes/node-problem-detector)),
we will overwrite the patch in our typicaly two-way strategic patch for node status
updates.
The reason why the standard kubelet can do this is because the flow goes:
apiserver->kubelet: Fetch current node
kubelet->kubelet: Update apiserver's snapshot with local state changes
kubelet->apiserver: patch
We don't have this luxury, as we rely on providers making a callback into us
in order to get the most recent pod status. They do not have a way
to do that merge operation themselves, and a two-way merge doesn't
give us enough metadata.
In order to work around this, we perform a three-way merge on behalf of
the user. We do this by stashing the contents of the last update inside
of it. We then fetch that status back, and use that for the future
update itself.
In the upgrade case, or the case where the VK has been created by
"someone else", we do not know which attributes were created by
or written by us, so we cannot generate a three way patch.
In this case, we will do our best to avoid deleting any attributes,
and only overwrite them. We will consider all current api server
values written by "someone else", and not edit them. This is done
by considering the "old node" to be empty.
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