Without the anchor, each policy update fires mutateExistingOnPolicyUpdate,
which OVERWRITES existing keel.sh/policy annotations back to 'force'. That
broke the phased rollout — bulk-setting workloads to 'never' didn't stick
because the next policy update reset them.
With +() anchors, the mutate only adds the annotation if missing. New
workloads (in enrolled namespaces) get force+match-tag; existing workloads
with explicit policy=never (out-of-band, for phased rollout) stay never.
Phase 1 rollout state (2026-05-17):
- 10 workloads on force+match-tag in 10 namespaces (Phase 1)
enrolled via keel.sh/enrolled=true namespace label:
linkwarden, excalidraw, diun, echo, foolery, city-guesser,
jsoncrack, privatebin, ntfy, speedtest
- 216 workloads on policy=never (out-of-band kubectl annotate)
- 31 critical namespaces excluded at policy level
Expand to Phase 2 by labeling more namespaces `keel.sh/enrolled=true`
and clearing the `never` annotation off their workloads.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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