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February 2021 Update

This month’s edition of updates on Flux v2 developments - 0.7 release, Flagger 1.6 release, project and website changes, new events and more.
By dholbach |
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Before we get started, what is GitOps?

If you are new to the community and GitOps, you might want to check out some general resources. We like the GitOps manifesto or the official GitOps FAQ written by folks at Weaveworks.

The Road to Flux v2

The Flux community has set itself very ambitious goals for version 2 and as it’s a multi-month project, 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 January - there have been many changes.

Flux2 v0.7 is here

The Flux2 team is very pleased to bring you the 0.7 release series. Most importantly these new features have been added:

  • The GitOps Toolkit controllers come with dedicated service accounts and RBAC (this is a breaking change for those of you who used the default SA to bind to IAM Roles).
  • All the controller images are now multi-arch (AMD64, ARM64, ARM 32bit), the --arch flag is no longer used when installing Flux.
  • You can now set a retry interval for Kustomization reconciliation failures.
  • In a multi-tenancy setup, health checking and garbage collection are now run using the tenant's service account.
  • The Helm storage namespace can be configured inside the HelmRelease spec, this is particularly useful when targeting remote clusters.
  • The image update automation can be triggered using DockerHub, Quay, Nexus, GCR, GHCR, Harbor and generic CI webhooks.
  • The image update policy now supports alphabetical sorting (Build IDs, CalVer, RFC3339 timestamps) and regex filters.
  • The image automation controllers can now be run on ARM devices with 1GiB RAM including RaspberryPI 32bit.
  • Flux bootstrap comes with support for GitLab sub-groups and project tokens.

If you have been watching our roadmap document, you might have noticed that we hit the 80% mark of automated image updates milestone. This means we are getting closer and closer to feature parity with Flux v1 overall.

Some bits are still on our to-do list, but soon we are going to start working on a migration guide for this particular feature and subsequently make a big push in terms of testing and asking for feedback before we ask everyone to cut over to Flux2. This will be a longer process for sure - we are just detailing our next steps here, so you’re aware of what’s coming next.

fluxcd.io website updates

In the last months’ summaries we talked about our plans of revamping our fluxcd.io website. Originally it was mostly just spiffy placeholder page which pointed to more Flux resources. Since then we landed a new design, made its focus Flux2, now we have added two pages which should hopefully help new users and aspiring contributors learn about their options getting help and joining the team

Please let us know if there’s anything missing or you’d like to help with the site or docs.

Speaking of support, long-time Flux contributor Kingdon Barrett joined Weaveworks as OSS Support Engineer and will take on a more active role in the Flux community. Here’s what he has to say

"I have been in the Flux community for some time, though it seems like only a short while since I first heard about Flux and started getting to know the helpful folks at Weaveworks. Happy to now be taking a more active part in the Flux community through my new role as the Open Source Support Engineer, I am glad to meet everyone and thanks for the welcoming atmosphere! I am here to support the community during the transition from Flux v1 into the new supported series, for all GitOps practitioners."

Needless to say: we’re very excited to have Kingdon with us!

The Flagger move is happening

Avid readers of our blog might be wondering why we’re reporting this again. It’s because the move of Flagger is still happening. Moving the Github repository and Docker images was just the first, and very obvious, step.

There are other resources though which are important for its community. Slack for instance. If you haven’t, please join the #flagger channel on the CNCF Slack - this is the new home for Flagger discussions.

Its website and documentation will be integrated into fluxcd.io at some point. We also want to update the scope and description of the Flux family of projects to encompass Flagger’s Progressive Delivery capabilities. Another important piece is the Flagger logo.

Bianca Cheng Costanzo has been working with the Flux community on a proposal for a new flagger logo - it would be great if you could leave your feedback and let us know how you feel about it.

Flagger v1.6 is here

We are very happy to announce the v1.6 release of Flagger. This release includes:

  • Support for A/B testing using Gloo Edge HTTP headers based routing.
  • Extended support for Istio's HTTPMatchRequest and VirtualService delegation.
  • Support for Kubernetes anti-affinity rules.

Note that starting with Flagger v1.6, the minimum supported version of Kubernetes is v1.16.0.

Repository cleanup

Just a heads-up: we have been cleaning up some of our example repositories. As there are v1 and v2 versions of these under the Flux organisation, we decided to archive the v1 versions and point to the corresponding new versions. These are in particular:

Both come with better documentation, diagrams and more features. So a triple-win for everyone. Be sure to check them out!

Upcoming events

It’s important to us 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. In the next days we have these events coming up for you:

8 Feb 2021 - Fluxv2 Image Update Automation Sneak Peak with Leigh Capili

On the road to feature parity with Flux v1, Image Update Automation is a big milestone for Flux v2. The hard at work Flux team has recently released this feature as alpha. During this session, Leigh Capili, DX Engineer at Weaveworks, will walk us through & demo configuring container image scanning and deployment rollouts with Flux v2.

For a container image you can configure Flux to:

  • scan the container registry and fetch the image tags
  • select the latest tag based on a semver range
  • replace the tag in Kubernetes manifests (YAML format)
  • checkout a branch, commit and push the changes to the remote Git repository
  • apply the changes in-cluster and rollout the container image

For production environments, this feature allows you to automatically deploy application patches (CVEs and bug fixes), and keep a record of all deployments in Git history. For staging environments, this feature allows you to deploy the latest pre-release of an application, without having to manually edit its deployment manifests in Git.

18 Feb 2021 - Who wants Cookies? … and GitOps and Runtime Security (at KubeSec Enterprise Online)

There is so much to think about with regard to cluster runtime security and your configuration pipeline. A good recipe helps you reduce the things you need to think about.

You will learn how to use quality OSS ingredients like Flux and Falco to serve a secure platform of gitops goodness the whole team will enjoy! You can rest easy in your gitops kitchen knowing no horrible geese (exploits, vulnerabilities etc) will burn your cookies.

This talk will be given by

  • Dan “POP” Papandrea, Director of Open Source Community and Ecosystem at Sysdig and
  • Leigh Capili, Developer Experience Engineer at Weaveworks

Check out our calendar section for more upcoming and links to recordings of past talks.

Get involved and join us

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.