Openshift: Change in trigger behavior between 3.6.1 and 3.7.1 - openshift

Question

I have two Openshift environments that I publish to from a Gitlab pipeline. Let's call the first one DEV and it runs Openshift v3.7.1+c2ce2c0-1. The second one is INT and runs v3.6.1+008f2d5. Recently DEV got upgraded from 3.6.1 to 3.7.1 and after that I noticed a strange change in the behavior of redeployment triggers.
In short, what I see is that existing deployments in the DEV environment are triggered to redeploy with an "Image changed" message when an unchanged deployment config template is applied and while the Docker image also remains unchanged. This means that for example a MongoDB or Jenkins deployment recreates all containers and loses all data with every run of the CI pipeline.
Yes, there is the theoretically the possibility to use persistent volumes but the Openshift installations are not under my control. The point here is that redeployments happen when neither image nor configuration changes.
The command that I am using from Gitlab is this:
oc process -f openshift-mongodb-ephemeral.yml -v MONGODB_DATABASE=mydb -v DATABASE_SERVICE_NAME=mongodb -l template=northbound-mongodb | oc apply -f -
Here is one of the deployment config templates:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Template
labels:
template: mongodb-ephemeral-template
metadata:
annotations:
description: |-
MongoDB database service, without persistent storage. For more information about using this template, including OpenShift considerations, see https://github.com/sclorg/mongodb-container/blob/master/3.2/README.md.
WARNING: Any data stored will be lost upon pod destruction. Only use this template for testing
iconClass: icon-mongodb
openshift.io/display-name: MongoDB (Ephemeral)
tags: database,mongodb
creationTimestamp: 2017-03-14T11:25:13Z
name: mongodb-ephemeral
resourceVersion: "483"
selfLink: /oapi/v1/namespaces/openshift/templates/mongodb-ephemeral
uid: e41b7f8e-08a8-11e7-9120-000d3a266151
objects:
- apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
creationTimestamp: null
name: ${DATABASE_SERVICE_NAME}
spec:
ports:
- name: mongo
nodePort: 0
port: 27017
protocol: TCP
targetPort: 27017
selector:
name: ${DATABASE_SERVICE_NAME}
sessionAffinity: None
type: ClusterIP
status:
loadBalancer: {}
- apiVersion: v1
kind: DeploymentConfig
metadata:
creationTimestamp: null
name: ${DATABASE_SERVICE_NAME}
spec:
replicas: 1
selector:
name: ${DATABASE_SERVICE_NAME}
strategy:
type: Recreate
template:
metadata:
creationTimestamp: null
labels:
name: ${DATABASE_SERVICE_NAME}
spec:
containers:
- capabilities: {}
env:
- name: MONGODB_USER
value: ${MONGODB_USER}
- name: MONGODB_PASSWORD
valueFrom:
secretKeyRef:
key: database-password
name: myproject-secrets
- name: MONGODB_ADMIN_PASSWORD
valueFrom:
secretKeyRef:
key: database-admin-password
name: myproject-secrets
- name: MONGODB_DATABASE
value: ${MONGODB_DATABASE}
image: ' '
imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
livenessProbe:
initialDelaySeconds: 30
tcpSocket:
port: 27017
timeoutSeconds: 1
name: mongodb
ports:
- containerPort: 27017
protocol: TCP
readinessProbe:
exec:
command:
- /bin/sh
- -i
- -c
- mongo 127.0.0.1:27017/$MONGODB_DATABASE -u $MONGODB_USER -p $MONGODB_PASSWORD
--eval="quit()"
initialDelaySeconds: 3
timeoutSeconds: 1
resources:
limits:
memory: ${MEMORY_LIMIT}
securityContext:
capabilities: {}
privileged: false
terminationMessagePath: /dev/termination-log
volumeMounts:
- mountPath: /var/lib/mongodb/data
name: ${DATABASE_SERVICE_NAME}-data
dnsPolicy: ClusterFirst
restartPolicy: Always
volumes:
- emptyDir:
medium: ""
name: ${DATABASE_SERVICE_NAME}-data
triggers:
- imageChangeParams:
automatic: true
containerNames:
- mongodb
from:
kind: ImageStreamTag
name: mongodb:${MONGODB_VERSION}
namespace: ${NAMESPACE}
lastTriggeredImage: ""
type: ImageChange
- type: ConfigChange
status: {}
parameters:
- description: Maximum amount of memory the container can use.
displayName: Memory Limit
name: MEMORY_LIMIT
required: true
value: 512Mi
- description: The OpenShift Namespace where the ImageStream resides.
displayName: Namespace
name: NAMESPACE
value: openshift
- description: The name of the OpenShift Service exposed for the database.
displayName: Database Service Name
name: DATABASE_SERVICE_NAME
required: true
value: mongodb
- description: Name of the MongoDB database accessed.
displayName: MongoDB Database Name
name: MONGODB_DATABASE
required: true
value: sampledb
- description: Version of MongoDB image to be used (2.4, 2.6, 3.2 or latest).
displayName: Version of MongoDB Image
name: MONGODB_VERSION
required: true
value: "3.2"
- description: Name of user to access MongoDB.
displayName: MongoDB user
name: MONGODB_USER
required: true
value: "mongouser"
The oc process and oc apply commands get executed with each execution of the Gitlab CI pipeline. The pipeline triggers whenever someone merges into e.g. the develop branch. I would like to keep this behavior because this guarantees if someone changes the configuration of MongoDB, Jenkins, etc. those get updated and redeployed automatically (in which case a loss of data is acceptable).
Does anybody know what change in OS could have prompted this change in behavior and how to achieve the old behavior again?

Answer 1

Credits go to Graham Dumpleton who answered my question, albeit through a comment. Since I did not hear back from him I am leaving this answer myself for completeness' sake.
After removing the entries
creationTimestamp
lastTriggeredImage
status
image
from the deployment config template, the unwanted redeployments stopped. I do not know which entry specifically started triggering the behavior in Openshift 3.7.1 but in any case, these four entries are information generated during an Openshift deployment process and should not be in a template to begin with.