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May 2022 Update

New Flux and Flagger releases - lots of new features. KubeCon Wrap-Up, GitOps Days coming up, Flux Ecosystem news, new project member and maintainer - and lots lots more!
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 June 2022 - let’s recap together what happened in May - it has been a lot!

News in the Flux family

Flux v0.30 release

The latest Flux release is the v0.30 release series. It comes with new features and improvements. Users are encouraged to upgrade for the best experience. Note: v0.29.0 included breaking changes.

🚀 Features and improvements

  • Support for disabling remote bases in Kustomize overlays: this release adds support to the kustomize-controller for disallowing remote bases in Kustomize overlays using --no-remote-bases=true (default: false). When this flag is enabled on the controller, all resources must refer to local files included in the Source Artifact, meaning only the Flux Sources can affect the cluster-state. Users are advised to enable it on production systems for security and performance reasons.
  • Support for defining a KubeConfig Secret data key: both Kustomization and HelmRelease resources do now accept a .spec.kubeConfig.SecretRef.key definition. When the value is specified, the KubeConfig JSON is retrieved from this data key in the referred Secret, instead of the defaults (value or value.yaml).
  • Support for defining a ServiceAccountName in ImageRepository objects: the ImageRepository object does now accept a .spec.serviceAccountName definition. When specified, the image pull secrets attached to the ServiceAccount are used to authenticate towards the registry.

🎁 Link to release page

🔒 Flux Security announcement

We published three CVEs today which affect Flux versions earlier than v0.29.0. We recommend updating your Flux system at your earliest convenience.

More information on the advisories can be found in our security policy page.

To get some additional background on the advisories and what steps we are taking to make Flux more secure, check out our blog post about the advisories as well.

Upcoming Flux Release

The next Flux release is just a few days out. Here is in a nutshell what you can look forward to - but there’ll be more!

  • OCI Helm chart support as described in RFC-0002 will become available. But at time of writing, has two caveats:
    • Chart dependencies from OCI repositories are not supported. #722
    • Custom CA certificates are not supported. #723
  • GitRepository reconciliation will be more efficient when checking out repositories using branches or tags by added support for no-op clones.
  • The libgit2 managed transport will be moved out of experimental mode, and is the new default.

Make sure you watch our Slack and Twitter to get the update. Give us a star and watch for releases maybe as well.

Flagger 1.21.0 brings lots of improvements

This release comes with an option to disable cross-namespace references to Kubernetes custom resources such as AlertProviders and MetricProviders. When running Flagger on multi-tenant environments it is advised to set the -no-cross-namespace-refs=true flag.

In addition, this version enables Flagger to target Istio and Kuma multi-cluster setups. When installing Flagger with Helm, the service mesh control plane kubeconfig secret can be specified using --set controlplane.kubeconfig.secretName.

Flux Ecosystem

We have a lot of updates from the Flux Ecosystem and love how everything keeps on growing! If you are interested in more news from Flux integration, make sure you register for GitOps Days at 8-9 June - a lot of engineers and companies will be talking about their work and how you can benefit from it.

Flux Subsystem for Argo

Flux Subsystem for Argo was upgraded to support Argo CD v2.2.9, and welcomed Kingdon Barrett as a new maintainer for the project.

Terraform-controller

terraform-controller v0.9.5 was released which contains new features such as support for Runner Pod’s metadata, support environment variables for Runner Pod so that you can set proxy for Terraform binary with HTTPS_PROXY for example. This release also included many bug fixes.

Weave GitOps

The Weave GitOps team released v0.8.1 for Weave GitOps. This release is an iteration on top of our prior release. We have fixed a lot of bugs and made UI enhancements based on feedback from the community. For example, you are able to reconcile Flux objects directly from the UI. We have a lot of great features planned over the next couple months. Please do not hesitate to drop in some feature requests.

New additions to the Flux Ecosystem

We are thrilled to see the Flux Ecosystem growing on a continuous basis. The most recent additions to our Flux Ecosystem page are flux-kluctl-controller and gardener-extension-shoot-flux.

kluctl/flux-kluctl-controller is a Flux controller for managing Kluctl deployments. Its website explains kluctl as follows

Kluctl is the missing glue to put together large Kubernetes deployments.

It allows you to declare and manage small, large, simple and/or complex multi-env and multi-cluster deployments.

Kluctl does not have cluster-side dependencies and works out of the box.

23technologies/gardener-extension-shoot-flux is a new integration with Flux. Gardener implements the automated management and operation of Kubernetes clusters as a service. With this extension fresh clusters will be reconciled to the state defined in the Git repository by the Flux controller.

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 May here are a couple of talks we would like to highlight.

Last month was all about KubeCon and there were lots of great sessions we enjoyed and recommend watching. It might be best if you just head to our KubeCon Re-Cap blog post and take it from there!

Here is a list of additional videos and topics we really enjoyed - please let us know if we missed anything of interest and we will make sure to mention it in the next post!

📺 GitOps with Flux on AKS @AzureKubernetesService (Amsterdam) Meetup - Kingdon Barrett (Weaveworks) & Jonathan Innis (Microsoft)

📺 GitOps: Core Concepts & How to Structure Your Repos - Scott Rigby & Priyanka Ravi (Weaveworks)

📺 DevOpsDays Birmingham AL: GitOps and Flux scaled to 100s of Developers - Bryan Oliver & Kingdon Barrett (Weaveworks)

📺 DOK (Data On Kubernetes) #127: Flux for Helm Users! With Scott Rigby (Weaveworks)

📺 Community Office Hours: Injecting Secrets from HashiCorp Vault into Flux - Priyanka Ravi (Weaveworks) & Rosemary Wang (Hashicorp)

📺 Reconcile Terraform Resources the GitOps Way - Priyanka Ravi (Weaveworks)

📺 GitOps (Flux) Extension for VS Code - Kingdon Barrett (Weaveworks)

#flexyourflux

The #flexyourflux campaign we started for KubeCon is still ongoing. Until GitOps Days (see below) you can still win a 1h-long 1-on-1 meeting with Flux Core Maintainer Stefan Prodan.

We will draw the lucky winners live at the GitOps Days event (8-9 June).

Upcoming Events 📆

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

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.

GitOps Days 2022

GitOps Days

GitOps Days 2022 is a free 2-day online event on June 8-9, 2022 with Flux center stage!

This is THE event for your GitOps journey! Getting started? Taking GitOps to the next level? We’ll cover all of the steps for your success!

The event will run from ~9:00 am PT to ~3:00 pm PT each day as a free online event.

✨✨ Register now to reserve your spot to receive updates to the schedule and speakers. Join the conversation! Chat with the speakers and other attendees! Invite yourself at https://slack.weave.works and hang out with us at #gitopsdays

  • Talks and tutorials on how to get started with Kubernetes and GitOps
  • Talks from Flux users about their use cases
  • How to do GitOps securely
  • Platforms that offer GitOps: Microsoft Arc Kubernetes, AWS Anywhere, Weave GitOps, D2iQ Kubernetes Platform, and more! all using Flux!
  • Flux in the CNCF and the GitOps Ecosystem
  • Flux support and Integrations: Flux + Helm, Terraform, HashiCorp Vault, Jenkins, OpenShift, Visual Studio Code, and much much more!
  • Technical deep dives with Flux maintainers
  • Speakers from Orange, RingCentral, and more just added

In other news

People writing/talking about Flux

We love it when you all write about Flux and share your experience, write how-tos on integrating Flux with other pieces of software or other things. Give us a shout-out and we will link it from this section! ✍

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: Tietoevry, Grafana Labs, Aily Labs, SisID, FHE3, Qualifio, Axel Springer SE, Cookpad.

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.

If you are like us, you really enjoy hearing adopter use case stories. At Gitops Days, there will be loads of those, so join us 8-9 June.

More docs and website news

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

  • By updating to the latest hugo and docsy, we were able to drop some of our custom code to show e.g. tabs in our documentation.
  • We added a gallery shortcode to be able to show a collection of pictures nicely.
  • New docs for
    • Enable Helm repositories caching
    • Locking down multi-tenant clusters by disabling Kustomize remote bases
    • Deploy key rotation
    • How to disable cross namespace references
    • How to bootstrap Flux on GCP GKE with Cloud Source repositories
  • New videos added to our Flux Resources page.

Thanks a lot to these folks who contributed to docs and website: Stefan Prodan, Ihor Sychevskyi, Matt J WIlliams, Paulo Gomes, Alexander Block, Andreas Loholt, Axel Fontana, Cosmin Banciu, Christian Berendt, Jiri Tyr, Julien Duchesne, Martin Weber, Max Jonas Werner, Steven Koeberich, as09.

In particular we would like to thank Ihor Sychevskyi who recently took on fixing small UI glitches all over the place - especially on mobile the site should work a lot better now!

New Project Member: Stacey Potter

Stacey Potter

We are very happy to announce that Stacey Potter joined us as a Flux Project Member.

Stacey has helped the Flux team out a great deal by organising a lot of Flux-related events like GitOps Days, Weave Online User Groups, adding videos to the Flux Resources page and our YouTube playlist, and coordinating with the team on our Project presence for KubeCon events. She’s such a pleasure to work with and we owe quite a bit of Flux’s success to the stages she created for our speakers.

As a side-note: we updated the Flux Governance recently to make it even clearer that we love all kinds of contributions, be they code or not. We hope that many more of you will follow this path.

New Flagger Maintainer: Sanskar Jaiswal

Sanskar Jaiswal

Sanskar Jaiswal has been working on Flux and Flagger for quite a while now. One of his major contributions was to add Gateway API support to Flagger. We are very pleased to let you know that he joined the ranks of Flagger maintainers now.

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.