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October 2021 update

Server-side reconciliation is coming, better transport and crypto support for libgit2, Flagger 1.14, KubeCon updates, GitOps One-Stop Shop Event to show-case Flux integrated being used in big GitOps offerings, community news!
By dholbach |
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As the Flux family of projects and its communities are growing, we strive to inform you each month about what has already landed, new possibilities which are available for integration, and where you can get involved. Read last month’s update here.

Let’s recap what happened in September - there has been so much happening!

Flux Project Facts

We are very proud of what we put together, here we want to reiterate some Flux facts - they are sort of our mission statement with Flux.

  1. 🤝 Flux provides GitOps for both apps or infrastructure. Flux and Flagger deploy apps with canaries, feature flags, and A/B rollouts. Flux can also manage any Kubernetes resource. Infrastructure and workload dependency management is built-in.
  2. 🤖 Just push to Git and Flux does the rest. Flux enables application deployment (CD) and (with the help of Flagger) progressive delivery (PD) through automatic reconciliation. Flux can even push back to Git for you with automated container image updates to Git (image scanning and patching).
  3. 🔩 Flux works with your existing tools: Flux works with your Git providers (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, can even use s3-compatible buckets as a source), all major container registries, and all CI workflow providers.
  4. ☸️ Flux works with any Kubernetes and all common Kubernetes tooling: Kustomize, Helm, RBAC, and policy-driven validation (OPA, Kyverno, admission controllers) so it simply falls into place.
  5. 🤹 Flux does Multi-Tenancy (and “Multi-everything”): Flux uses true Kubernetes RBAC via impersonation and supports multiple Git repositories. Multi-cluster infrastructure and apps work out of the box with Cluster API: Flux can use one Kubernetes cluster to manage apps in either the same or other clusters, spin up additional clusters themselves, and manage clusters including lifecycle and fleets.
  6. 📞 Flux alerts and notifies: Flux provides health assessments, alerting to external systems and external events handling. Just “git push”, and get notified on Slack and other chat systems.
  7. 👍 Users trust Flux: Flux is a CNCF Incubating project and was categorised as "Adopt" on the CNCF CI/CD Tech Radar (alongside Helm).
  8. 💖 Flux has a lovely community that is very easy to work with! We welcome contributors of any kind. The components of Flux are on Kubernetes core controller-runtime, so anyone can contribute and its functionality can be extended very easily.

This section has made it onto the landing page of https://fluxcd.io now - let us know how you like it!

News in the Flux family

Server-side reconciliation is coming

We are going to land a big feature with lots of improvements for everyone very soon. Server-side reconciliation will make Flux more performant, improve overall observability and going forward will allow us to add new capabilities, like being able to preview local changes to manifests without pushing to upstream.

⚠ Changes required: Due to a Kubernetes issue, we require a certain set of Kubernetes releases (starting 1.6.11 - more on this below) as a minimum. The logs, events and alerts that report Kubernetes namespaced object changes are now using the Kind/Namespace/Name format instead of Kind/Name.

Read our detailed release announcement with instructions on how to prepare for this change.

Better transport and crypto support for libgit2

The next release of Flux is coming soon and will include an improvement to the libgit2 Git implementation. The source-controller and image-automation-controller both use this library (in combination with others like go-git) to perform cloning and/or push operations on remote Git repositories.

Unfortunately, due to libgit2 depending on various other C libraries for transport and crypto, using the OS packages has proven to not always provide a reliable setup, especially not one that supports a wide range of key formats. As we want our users to be able to use modern private and/or host key formats like ECDSA* and ED25519, we now build the library ourselves while linking against the correct libraries (OpenSSL and LibSSH2) which should solve most issues around private keys. Support for a wider range of host keys is still pending, but will eventually become available as well, once libgit >=1.2 can properly be used in Go.

This will also prepare us for changing the build to static, which will allow us to enable fuzzing for more controllers.

Check out the in-flight PR for more information if you are curious. Thanks a lot Chanwit Kaekwasi, Hidde Beydals and Sunny for your work on this!

Flagger 1.14 has landed

We have released Flagger v1.14.0. This release comes with bug fixes to Istio load balancer settings and in-line PromQL. Starting with this version, the canary analysis can be extended with metrics targeting InfluxDB, Dynatrace, and Google Cloud Monitoring (Stackdriver).

Thanks to Somtochi Onyekwere for integrating Flagger with InfluxDB & Stackdriver and for all the bug fixes.

Upcoming events

It’s important to keep you up to date with new features and developments in Flux and provide simple ways to see our work in action and chat with our engineers.

Flux at GitOpsCon and KubeCon

One of the really big themes at KubeCon this time is GitOps. Because of this, KubeCon organisers have put together GitOpsCon as well, as a dedicated Day 0 event. Below we are going to list our favourites Flux related sessions - for an up-to-date list of everything take a look at the “schedule” of our Flux KubeCon mini-site. (All times are Pacific Time.)

Meet the Maintainer

There will be three Flux Project Office Hours where you can meet our maintainers:

GitOpsCon

Our friends from the GitOps working group have put together a fantastic event - here are some talks you should watch out for on October 12:

KubeCon talks on the main event and our booth

Take a look at our Flux KubeCon mini-site. This is where you can connect with us for all the Flux related talks at the event. During KubeCon hours we will be at our virtual and in-person booth in the CNCF Project Pavillion - drop by for a chat, for short talks from engineers and users. It’ll be a great way to get involved with our community and have all your questions answered.

GitOps One-Stop Shop Event

So KubeCon will be lots of fun and give you lots of great Flux content, but only a week afterwards we have a real treat coming up for you.

If you want to learn more about how big vendors have built their GitOps offerings on top of Flux, sign up at https://gitopsdays.com and learn from Amazon, D2IQ, Microsoft, VMware and Weaveworks why they chose Flux and which cool services and products they have got to offer. See you there on October 20th!

Flux Bug Scrub

During KubeCon, Flux’s weekly Bug Scrub will be postponed unless another volunteer wants to run one! Kingdon, who hosts Bug Scrub each week, is going in person to Los Angeles to present: how to deploy Jenkins declaratively with Helm Controller, and other fun things.

Throughout KubeCon, look for Flux maintainers at media events and giving talks in the Flux booth, (TBD: or at least, virtually talking in the booth! Maybe due to social distancing rules.)

As for Bug Scrub, I foresee that cancellation or postponement of the weekly event is likely while KubeCon is going on in person, … but if there are volunteers at the usual time, and enough interested people who want to perform the bug scrub activity get together, they will be put to work! There will always be plenty of bugs to scrub for the foreseeable future.

This week, and every other week, find Bug Scrub with a link to the Zoom invite beneath the fold alongside other scheduled Flux developer team events.

One more thing

Martin Hickey (Helm maintainer), and Scott Rigby (Helm and Flux maintainer) present a feature showcase and demos of both Helm and Flux, reasons for the overwhelming community use of Helm for application packaging and deployment on k8s, and how Helm is extended by Flux for teams moving to GitOps.

🔹 Helm - https://helm.sh/ helps you manage Kubernetes applications — Helm Charts helps you define, install, and upgrade even the most complex Kubernetes application.

🔹 The GitOps Toolkit is the set of APIs and controllers that make up the runtime for Flux. The APIs comprise Kubernetes custom resources, which can be created and updated by a cluster user, or by other automation tooling.

🔹 The Helm Controller built on Kubernetes controller runtime and is part of the GitOps Toolkit – allows one to declaratively manage Helm chart releases with Kubernetes manifests.

📍 Date: Tuesday, October 5th @ 10 am PST to 11 am PST (1:00 pm EST - 2:00 pm EST)

In other news

News from the Website and our Docs

Our website https://fluxcd.io is the central place for news and docs regarding Flux and we put quite some effort into making it ever more useful and interesting. If you have feedback or would like to help out, reach out alisondy, dholbach or scottrigby on Slack.

In the past month we made large parts of the site more easily maintainable. Juozas Gaigalas simplified the styling and beautified the looks of the site in many places as well - thanks for your work on it!

We are pleased to see that the number of contributors to the docs is slowly growing. Many small improvements to make the content more readable and correct. Go team!

Apart from that we were able to add more adopters and integrations. Please add yourself if you haven’t already.

What to watch out next for: Alison Dowdney is working on restructuring the documentation to make it even easier to find things. Reach out to her, if you want to help out or have observations you would like to share.

People writing about Flux

We have two sets of articles we would like to share. (Please reach out to us if you find others show-casing Flux projects.)

Manage your Kubernetes clusters with Flux 2

Cyril Becker wrote a very nice introductory article over at https://medium.com/alterway/manage-your-kubernetes-clusters-with-flux2-82dd1cfe2a6a. If you are entirely new to the concept of GitOps and want to learn more and follow a how-to, check the article out.

GitOps - Part 1+2

Girish Goudar, Cloud & DevOps Architect at EY wrote a set of two articles to explain GitOps using Flux.

In the first article https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/gitops-part-1-girish-goudar-1c/ you will learn how to deploy apps using Helm and Kustomizations.

The second article https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/gitops-part-2-girish-goudar/ focuses on securing apps using Mozilla SOPS.

Over and out

If you like what you read and would like to get involved, here are a few good ways to do that:

We are looking forward to working with you.