AKO crashing due to incorrect pool reference

Products

• VMware Avi Load Balancer

Issue/Introduction

The customer reported an issue where they were unable to successfully create a Load Balancer (LB) service VCF automation. This condition consistently resulted in the Avi Kubernetes Operator (AKO) pod entering a crash state.

 # Identify the crashing Pod
 kubectl get pods -n <namespace>

The following status was observed from the AKO pod: CrashLoopBackOff

 
 # Check logs of the crashing container
kubectl logs <Podname> -n <namespace> 

The following error log was observed from the AKO pod:
panic: interface conversion: interface { } is nil, not string

# Describe the pod for events and error details
kubectl describe pod <Podname> -n <namespace>

Environment

 Avi Controller Version:​ 31.1.2
 
Vcenter Version:​ 9.0

Cause

Manual modifications to the Virtual Service configuration outside of AKO can result in an AKO crash. Configuration changes must be managed exclusively through AKO to ensure consistency and stability.

Specifically, when service_pool_select is populated with service_pool_ref instead of service_pool_group_ref, AKO encounters a nil value at the expected code location during conversion, causing it to crash.

 

Resolution

All Virtual Service configuration changes should be applied through AKO configuration only. Manual edits to AKO-managed resources are not supported and may lead to unexpected behavior, including service disruption.