Che plugin broker should support ephemeral mode

[l0rd]

Description

It is now possible to configure workspace to run in ephemeral mode (i.e. PVs will be of type EmptyDir) setting persistVolumes attribute to false.

"attributes": {
  "persistVolumes": "false"
}

But Che 7 plugin brokers are still started with PVCs (broker-config-volume and claim-che-workspace). Can we fix that?

[garagatyi]

@l0rd Since broker is running in a pod separate from workspace pods how would we deliver plugins into the workspace? Looks like we would need to redesign the flow to achieve this. WDYT?

[l0rd]

@garagatyi yes. That's what I am worried about. But in the new theia-plugin-broker we should not need to deliver plugins anymore don't we?

[garagatyi]

Actually, we need it. Theia reads metadata from the plugins package.json files.

[garagatyi]

@benoitf could you comment whether I am correct.

[amisevsk]

From a brief look at this yesterday, one issue that has to be addressed before anything else is #11653.

Apart from that, it seems like the task of getting the plugin broker to work with ephemeral workspaces will be rather difficult; since the broker runs separate from the workspace pod, it's impossible to share storage between the two at the moment. After discussion with @garagatyi I've got a few leads and will work towards a proof-of-concept PR to see if we can implement this.

[amisevsk]

Opened PR #11657 to address #11653.

[garagatyi]

@amisevsk can we close this issue?