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July 2022 Update

Flux’s upcoming release will bring improved OCI support and more stability. Flagger adds KEDA support. We celebrated out ever increasing ecosystem. On top of that: security best-practices, more docs, videos and contributor 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 our last update here.

It’s the beginning of August 2022 - let’s recap together what happened in July - it has been a lot!

News in the Flux family

Next Flux release: OCI Helm improvements and consolidated Git implementations

The whole Flux team is busy working on the v0.32.x Flux release that’s planned for early August. A lot of our planned changes have already landed and what you can look forward to is: OCI for Kubernetes manifests and further enhancements to the OCI for Helm support that shipped already are also included. Support for Cosign will not be included in this release just yet, but will come later.

It’s not too late to provide early feedback for the OCI support, we still need more user engagement/feedback to guarantee this feature is ready for release.

We have planned on this release finally decommissioning our libgit2 Unmanaged Transport and replacing it with the new Managed Transport (it will no longer be experimental, now default!)

The upgrade to managed transport should be opaque and seamless for the end user. Hopefully Flux users will notice things are more stable, but no changes are needed in order to take advantage of this upgrade, other than simply upgrading.

Security news

When we started writing about Security in Flux, folks started asking us more questions about how to ensure their Flux deployments were secure. We are happy to announce that we documented Flux’s Security Best Practices on our website. It comes with a simple checklist that you can follow to ensure you implemented it. You can also go deeper and expand the text blocks to understand the rationale and backgrounds better.

Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback - we are happy to add to this section.

Flagger 1.22 brings KEDA Support

This Flagger release is a big one. It comes with support for KEDA ScaledObjects as an alternative to HPAs. KEDA is a CNCF Incubation project and is supported in e.g. Azure. Check out our tutorial to understand how to use it with Flagger.

Other improvements in the release are:

  • The .spec.service.appProtocol field can now be used to specify the appProtocol of the services that Flagger generates.
  • A bug related to the Contour prometheus query for when service name is overwritten along with a bug related to Contour HTTPProxy annotations have been fixed.
  • The installation guide for Alibaba ServiceMesh has been updated.

Read the full list of improvements and fixes in the 1.22.0 and 1.22.1 changelog entries.

Flux Ecosystem

Flux Subsystem for Argo

The team released Flux Subsystem for Argo by rebasing it to Argo CD v2.2.11, which contains many serious security fixes. They verified that this version of FSA worked with recent versions of Flux, including Flux v2 0.31.4.

Terraform-controller

The authors had been identifying performance bottlenecks in the TF controller. Now with the bottlenecks identified, they have been able to start rewriting the certification rotation component to improve the performance of the controller. The performance improvement is expected to land by the mid of August.

Their most recent release 0.10.0 contains the following improvements:

  • Add support for Terraform Enterprise
  • Implement resource inventory
  • Improve security to make the images work with Weave GitOps Enterprise
  • Re-implement certificate rotator
  • Correct IRSA docs
  • Update Kubernetes libraries to v0.24.3, go-restful to fix CVE-2022-1996
  • Add pprof to the /debug/pprof endpoint
  • Fix race condition to make sure that gRPC client and the runner use the same TLS

VS Code GitOps Extension

In our last monthly updates we talked about the GitOps Extension for VS Code that is based on top of Flux. If you always wanted to see it in action to be able to understand what it can do for you, check out our recent blog post which contains the VSCode Extension Demo from GitOps Days.

Weave GitOps

The team is working towards a new release of Weave GitOps OSS. They’ve made some quality of life improvements in our latest release v0.9.1. I'm so glad you asked. This is a CLI command in Weave GitOps OSS that will make it simpler to get started with Flux and GitOps. In addition, it enables live feedback while configuring your cluster. They are aiming for simplicity for those that are new to Kubernetes and GitOps. They are looking for beta testers so if you know anyone that might be interested then please have them sign up here.

On the Enterprise side they are getting close to enhance and extend the flux tenant model, providing the user with capabilities to create tenants from a declarative yaml that can be versioned. Enabling platform teams to create isolated tenants with boundaries. Define allowed sources, targets. RBAC and policy with a single tool.

Azure GitOps

Azure GitOps now supports Flux v2 in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes (Arc K8s) clusters ( blog post). Azure lets customers use the same managed Flux service for their cluster configuration and application deployment across all their clusters – Azure, on-premises, multi-cloud. The Azure team works closely with Weaveworks to improve upstream Flux (e.g., multi-tenancy) and continues the partnership.

New additions to the Flux Ecosystem

We redesigned our Ecosystem page! Up until recently we simply listed tools, extensions and integrations that either simplified using Flux in various contexts or extended its functionality.

What was missing was the great work a lot of companies have done to bring GitOps to their users in the form of products and services. We now show a list of these and logos for those who approved the use of logos. If you are in the market for a complete GitOps solution, go check it out!

Another big topic in our user community is the one of UIs. We now added a section with screenshots to give you a good idea of what your options are and how they can simplify your workflow.

We realise that some ecosystem entries might be missing - if you find one, please send a PR, we want this page to grow!

Recent & 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.

Recent Events (ICYMI) 📺

We feel blessed to have such a big community of users, contributors and integrators and so many are happy to talk about their experiences. In July here are a couple of talks we would like to highlight.

Check out the recent CNCF livestream with Kingdon Barrett and Priyanka Ravi, Enhance your GitOps Experience with Flux Tools & Extensions.

In addition to that we recently started discussing a number of great talks from last month’s GitOps Days in blog posts. Check out these posts - they contain a summary of the talks and show the videos as well:

Please let us know if we missed anything of interest and we will make sure to mention it in the next post!

Upcoming Events 📆

We are happy to announce that we have a number of events coming up in August - tune in to learn more about Flux and GitOps best practices, get to know the team and join our community.

CNCF Livestream (Aug 17) with Kingdon Barrett

The Flux project continues in active development with the addition of OCI configuration planned in the GA roadmap. Another Flux advancement has been the creation of the new VSCode Extension which provides a convenient interface to Flux that can help reduce friction moving between editor and terminal, alleviating the headache of context switching overloading developer focus.

Flux maintainer Kingdon Barrett will demonstrate the pre-release of Flux's new OCI features and a convenient way to access them while they remain in pre-release so you can provide the feedback that is needed by Flux maintainers to make this feature a success!

Flux Bug Scrub

Our Flux Bug Scrubs still are happening on a weekly basis and remain one of the best ways to get involved in Flux. They are a friendly and welcoming way to learn more about contributing and how Flux is organised as a project.

The next dates are going to be:

We are flexible with subjects and often go with the interests of the group or of the presenter. If you want to come and join us in either capacity, just show up or if you have questions, reach out to Kingdon on Slack.

We really enjoyed this demo of the k3d git server recently. It’s a local Git server that runs outside of Kubernetes, to support offline dev in a realistic but also simple way that does not depend on GitHub or other hosted services.

In other news

News from the Website and our Docs

Flux Adopters shout-out

We are very pleased to announce that the following adopters of Flux have come forward and added themselves to our website: Mintmesh and SenseLabs.

If you have not already done so, use the instructions here or give us a ping and we will help to add you. Not only is it great for us to get to know and welcome you to our community. It also gives the team a big boost in morale to know where in the world Flux is used everywhere.

More docs and website news

We added a Troubleshooting cheatsheet! This has been a request from our community for a long time and we would love to hear your feedback! What do you and your team use for incidents? Is it playbooks? What would you expect in Flux docs for managing incidents and troubleshooting?

We are constantly improving our documentation and website - here are a couple of small things we landed recently:

  • New use-case: GitHub Actions Basic App Builder:
    This guide shows how to configure GitHub Actions to build an image for each new commit pushed on a branch, for PRs, or for tags in the most basic way that Flux’s automation can work with and making some considerations for both dev and production.
    A single GitHub Actions workflow is presented with a few variations but one simple theme: Flux’s only firm requirement for integrating with CI is for the CI to build and push an image. So this document shows how to do just that.
  • We expanded our documentation on Azure to include Using Helm OCI with Azure Container Registry.
  • Flagger news! We updated the docs on our website to match the newest version of Flagger (1.22). This adds a tutorial for how to do Canary analysis with KEDA SealedObjects. In addition to that the install guides were updated, in particular the instructions for setting up Flagger on Alibaba ServiceMesh was simplified quite a bit.
  • We updated the resources section on the fluxcd.io landing page to show updated content with more breadth across the Flux space.
  • We updated to a more recent version of the Docsy theme, which allowed us to drop some of our own customisations. With this we also updated to the new version of the Algolia API - this should give you better search results as well.
  • And lots of other small improvements.

Thanks a lot to these folks who contributed to docs and website: Paulo Gomes, Kingdon Barrett, Ihor Sychevskyi, Max Jonas Werner, Santosh Kaluskar, Stefan Prodan, Hidde Beydals, Jonathan Innis, Soulé Ba, Stacey Potter, @chengleqi and @kirankldevops.

Archival of Flux Web UI

The fluxcd/webui project was archived. It was in active development from November 2020 to June 2021, but unfortunately it could not be kept alive. This is why we felt the need to point users to the following alternatives for UIs for Flux instead.

  1. Weaveworks offers a free and open source GUI for Flux under the weave-gitops project.
    weave-gitops-flux-ui
    You can install the Weave GitOps UI using a Flux HelmRelease, please see the Weave GitOps documentation for more details.
  2. The Flux community maintains a series of Grafana dashboards for monitoring Flux.

    flux-grafana
    See the monitoring section of the Flux documentation for how to install Flux's Grafana dashboards.

New Flux Project Member: Ihor Sychevskyi

We are very pleased to welcome Ihor Sychevskyi as a project member into the Flux family. Over the past months Ihor has been busy improving our website in many many places. A lot of small UI glitches all over the place fell into this category and if you view fluxcd.io on mobile the site is getting better all the time!

Be like Ihor: If you have contributed to Flux and are interested in joining the Flux project as a member, please take a look at our governance documentation for this.

Flux Project Facts

We are very proud of what we have put together. 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 is designed with security in mind: Pull vs. Push, least amount of privileges, adherence to Kubernetes security policies and tight integration with security tools and best-practices. Read more about our security considerations.
  5. ☸️ 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.
  6. 🤹 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.
  7. 📞 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.
  8. 👍 Users trust Flux: Flux is a CNCF Incubating project and was categorised as "Adopt" on the CNCF CI/CD Tech Radar (alongside Helm).
  9. 💖 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.

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.