Hi John,

I had been thinking about this a bit more, and I think it would be
reasonable to consider adding an end point that is similar to the /stats
end point, that queries Diego, to get actual state on environment variables
and as part of that VCAP_SERVICES for the running app instances.
Thoughts on that approach? Would that help address the problem?

-Dieu

On Wed, Nov 4, 2015 at 9:03 AM, john mcteague <john.mcteague(a)gmail.com>
wrote:

I had this conversation with a few different people during the berlin
summit and promised one of them I would repeat it on the mailing list today
to get further feedback.

Today, once we push an application, the droplet is immutable. It doesnt
change until you push the application again or restage. I believe the
entire container could change without a new push if you upgrade the rootfs
and restart all the apps (which the CF operator would do).

However, the environment vars and service bindings can be changed on an
application but they would not take affect until the next restart.The CF
API would report these changes as active when you run *cf env *or *cf
services. *There is no distinction between desired state and current
state when using the API.

To me this is a significant gap as we cannot necessarily get a true view
of the world (i call cf set-env but dont restart the app, how do I know
from the API what value of that env var my app is using).

How are people addressing this in their own environments and is it
something that the core API team should be considering (I ask the latter
publicly even though I asked Dieu during the summit :) ).

John