Deprecation of the old containerpool

[Markus Thömmes <ma...@me.com>]

Hi all,

development of the reactive containerpool is finished and it's been tested thoroughly in our (IBM's) pipeline. It is used in the Bluemix hosted OpenWhisk deployment for a while now which makes me believe we should start the deprecation process for the "old" containerpool since it's subject to confusion what the difference between both are.

As a first stepping stone, I opened: https://github.com/apache/incubator-openwhisk/pull/2528 to enable the pool in all environments managed by the open repository. That will leave "custom" deployments alone and should keep the update path for production environments untouched for now. Note that our whole testcoverage will from then on be based on the new pool.

The next step will be to enable the new pool as a default, environments would have to opt-in to get the old implementation. I'd do that on 02.08.2017 (2nd of August). Two weeks later (16th of August), I'd like to completely remove the old implementation to further reduce confusion about the duplicated codebase.

There is no change in protocols regarding the new pool and it should be a drop-in replacement for the old one.

Any concerns?

Cheers,
Markus