Terraform: “Error: insufficient items for attribute “sku”; must have at least 1″
Last week, we were attempting to deploy a new Terraform-owned resource but every time we ran terraform plan or terraform apply, we got the error Error: insufficient items for attribute "sku"; must have at least 1. We keep our Terraform code in a Azure DevOps project, with approvals being required for any new commits even into our dev environment, so we were flummoxed.
Our first thought was that we had upgraded the Terraform azurerm provider from 1.28.0 to 1.32.0 and we knew for a fact that the azurerm_key_vault resource had been changed from accepting a sku {} block to simply requiring a sku_name property. We tried every combination of having either, both, and none of them defined, and we still received the error. We even tried downgrading back to 1.28.0 as a fallback, but it made no change. At this point we were relatively confident that it wasn’t the provider.
The next thing we looked for was any other resources that had a sku {} block defined. This included our azurerm_app_service_plans, our azure_virtual_machines, and our azurerm_vpn_gateway. We searched for and commented out all of the respective declarations from our .tf files, but still we received the error.
Now we were starting to get nervous. Nothing we tried would solve the problem, and we were starting to get a backlog of requests for new resources that we couldn’t deploy because no matter what we did, whether adding or removing potentially broken code, we couldn’t deploy any new changes. To say the tension on our team was palpable would be the understatement of the year.
At this point we needed to take a step back and analyze the problem logically, so we all took a break from Terraform to clear our minds and de-stress a bit. We started to suspect something in the state file was causing the problem, but we weren’t really sure what. We decided to take the sledgehammer approach and using terraform state rm, we removed every instance of those commented out resources we found above.
This worked. Now we could run terraform plan and terraform apply without issue, but we still weren’t sure why. That didn’t bode well if the problem re-occured; we couldn’t just keep taking a sledgehammer to the environment, it’s just too disruptive. We needed to figure out the root cause.
We opened an issue on the provider’s GitHub page for further investigation, and after some digging by other community members and Terraform employees themselves, it seems that Microsoft’s API returns a different response for App Service Plans than any other resource when it is found to be missing. An assumption was being made that it would be the same for all resources, but it turned out that this was a bad assumption to make.
This turned out to be the key for us. Someone had deleted several App Service Plans from the Azure portal (thinking they were not being used) and so our assumption is that when the provider is checking for the status of a missing App Service Plan, the broken response makes Terraform think it actually exists, even though there’s no sku {} data in it, causing Terraform to think that that specific data was missing.
Knowing the core problem, the error message Error: insufficient items for attribute "sku"; must have at least 1 kind of makes sense now: the sku attribute is missing at least 1 item, it just doesn’t make clear that the “insufficient items” are on the Azure side, not the Terraform / .tf side.
They’ve added a workaround in the provider until Microsoft updates the API to respond like all of the other resources.
Have you seen this error before? What did you do to solve it?