November 2021 update

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 October - there has been so much happening!

News in the Flux family

Server side apply has landed

We gave you a heads-up on our blog a few weeks ago. Since then, it has happened: Server-Side Apply has landed in Flux for real. This makes Flux more performant, your cluster will get more observable and this opens up the gates for new features. It also makes Flux more easily maintainable in the future.

Please refer to the announcement blog post to learn how to update your cluster to work well with it!

Flux 0.20 is out

Since the last monthly update a flurry of Flux releases saw the light of day, so let’s go through them one by one to see which new features, fixes and improvements came our way.

0.20 adds a new command called flux tree. Here is what it can look like in action:

$ flux tree kustomization flux-system --compact

Kustomization/flux-system/flux-system
├── Kustomization/flux-system/infrastructure
│ ├── HelmRepository/cert-manager/cert-manager
│ └── HelmRelease/cert-manager/cert-manager
├── Alert/flux-system/slack
├── Provider/flux-system/slack
└── GitRepository/flux-system/flux-system

On top of that we improved end-to-end tests and Git implementations (more efficient shallow clones and performance fixes). Also note the new support for Sprig functions.

0.19 brought a bunch of new features: support for SOPS encrypted .env files. We updated to Helm 3.7.1, added support for Prometheus Alertmanager and experimental support for automatically getting credentials from AWS when scanning images in ECR. On top of that authentication enhancements for GCP and lots and lots of other improvements and fixes.

0.18 brought Server Side Apply and more.

It’s really really worth updating, but do note: If you are upgrading from 0.17 or older versions, please see the Upgrade Flux to the v1beta2 API guide.

Flagger 1.15 is out

We are blessed and fortunate to have our own progressive delivery solution within the Flux project. Its 1.15 release brings support for NGINX ingress canary metrics (you will need nginx-ingress v1.0.2 at least).

Starting with this version, Flagger will use the spec.service.apex.annotations to annotate the generated apex VirtualService, TrafficSplit or HTTPProxy.

Apart from that we updated the load tester binaries and added podLabels to the load tester Helm chart.

Flux on OpenShift progress

If you have been watching the OpenShift GitOps space, you will have seen quite a bit of movement lately. We talked about this in some of our last posts, we got OpenShift docs up for Flux, the Flux Operator has landed in the OperatorHub and RedHat were key presenters at the the last GitOps One-Stop Shop Event (see below).

Flux contributor and Developer Experience engineer at Weaveworks Chanwit Kaewkasi has been hard at work and put together these proof-of-concept repositories:

• Multi-tenant demo for Flux on OpenShift: It is a Flux multi-tenancy demo for OpenShift. What’s nice about the demo is that it will use only the Web UI of OpenShift to install Flux and bootstrap the demo. Yes - as a Cluster-Admin user, you can run a GitOps system by just clicking. You click to install Flux via OperatorHub, then you click to import one of the following snippets into your cluster, and your multi-tenant GitOps system will be ready to use in minutes.

• An example of how to write Flux policies for Gatekeeper: this is a Rego-based OPA policy to support Flux multi-tenancy enforcement. Tested on OpenShift 4.8.

We are very pleased to see this relationship thriving - stay tuned for more news!

New maintainers on board the Flux project

We as the Flux community are blessed to have new contributors who step up to become maintainers eventually. In the past month we had three(!) new maintainers come on board.

Max Jonas Werner from D2IQ

Having been part of the Flux journey for a long while already, we knew Max from the Flux Dev meetings already. When we learned that D2IQ was basing their product on top of Flux, we were obviously thrilled. Now he is maintainer of Flux - what’s more: Max has contributed patches, review time and community gardening time since then - and spoke at the GitOps One-Stop Shop Event as well. Thanks for everything you do! 💖

“I'm very happy to be joining a lively community and an extremely exciting project as a maintainer. Thank you for the warm welcome.”

Sunny and Soulé Ba from Weaveworks

Sunny has been maintaining (among many other things) tools like Weave Ignite for a while already, and joined the Flux effort a few months back and since then made a big number of improvements to almost all the Flux controllers. We are glad to have him around - big parts of the recently started refactoring effort will happen a lot faster!

Soulé Ba, who also works for Weaveworks, has been working on one big feature recently which was to add Bitbucket Server (a.k.a Stash) support to Flux (via go-git-providers). We are very pleased to have a solid team of people working on go-git-providers and to be able to offer more providers. Thanks in any case, Soulé for stepping up!

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.

Flux at GitOpsCon and KubeCon

GitOpsCon

We are proud and happy to have Flux Maintainer Scott Rigby co-host GitOpsCon again, and see and hear all the great talks that featured Flux! If you missed any of the talks, you can see the schedule here and be on the lookout for the videos as they should be posted soon.

KubeCon

This was our first time hosting a hybrid booth - we were in-person and online at KubeCon NA 2021 and were super happy to chat with all the booth visitors and hear great talks from the community. Our online booth schedule is still up - we’ll update with video links as soon as they're available - stay tuned! 📺🍿

Special shoutout to our Flux Maintainers Michael Bridgen and Hidde Beydals for presenting Flux’s Roadmap to GA, as well as Stefan Prodan, Philip Laine, and Kingdon Barrett for more presentations at the Flux Project Office Hours sessions! These will be part of the forthcoming videos!

GitOps One-Stop Shop Event

This was a half day event on October 20, 2021 to celebrate a major milestone for our project! Speakers from top cloud and GitOps vendors - Amazon Web Services, D2iQ, Microsoft, VMware, Red Hat, and Weaveworks showcased their enterprise-grade GitOps offerings which are all using Flux to provide the very best GitOps to their customers!

If you missed it, no worries! You can still sign up at the website (www.gitopsdays.com) to watch the recording!

There were other Flux related talks this past month too – keep an eye out for these on the Flux website resources page!

Flux Bug Scrub

Here is an update from Kingdon and the rest of the Flux team:

We’ve had a great many special events in the past month or so, and our team has been busy coordinating, planning, participating, and promoting those, so meanwhile the Bug Scrub activity has been mostly on hiatus for the month of October! But we’ll be starting up again in earnest, in the first week of November, and should begin holding Bug Scrub activities again regularly over the next few weeks, until the holiday season is upon us.

If you are interested in making contributions to Flux but maybe aren’t sure where to start, or just want to spend some time mulling over issues with the team, Bug Scrub is a great place to get acquainted with the issues that are being raised by community members and find out more about how you can play a part and help move the Flux project closer to graduation!

You can find a link to the Bug Scrub on our calendar, which has the Zoom link and is in UTC time, or get reminded in your own time zone by subscribing to the flux-dev calendar.

Hope to see you there!

One more thing

We had quite a bit of OpenShift related news, check out this interview between Stefan Prodan, one of our Flux maintainers and Chris Wright, the Red Hat CTO. They cover GitOps from various interesting angles. It’s certainly worth your time.

Infrastructure as code? #GitOps or go home? Do we even need #Kubernetes? Join @Kernelcdub and @StefanProdan for a new episode of Technically Speaking and skip the clickbait: https://t.co/V0JISPrYbn pic.twitter.com/xsN4y2JhLM

— Red Hat (@RedHat) October 27, 2021

In other news

News from the Website and our Docs

In the Flux team we are very happy we are able to put effort and time into our documentation and website. This month we improved some of the maintenance bits of the site, we updated to a new version of the Docsy theme - which gives us more options for expressing ourselves in documentation. A couple new adopters added themselves - welcome to our community! Also thanks Juozas Gaigalas for the many fixes regarding styling, beautification and bringing in a nicer 404 page! 🤩

On top of that: more frequently asked questions and many more updates to the docs, particularly around the new world order involving Server-Side Apply! We updated our Contributor docs as well! Hope to see you on the other side!

Over and out

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

• Join our upcoming dev meetings on 2021-11-04 or 2021-11-10.
• Talk to us in the #flux channel on CNCF Slack
• Join the planning discussions
• And if you are completely new to Flux, take a look at our Get Started guide and give us feedback
• Social media: Follow Flux on Twitter, join the discussion in the Flux LinkedIn group.

We are looking forward to working with you.

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.

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