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April 2022 update

New Flux and Flagger releases bring you the latest and greatest just yet! KubeCon news, GitOps Days coming up and lots of new resources - potentially the most newly added videos in particular! Lots of great contributions from our community. 💖
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 May 2022 - let’s recap together what happened in April - it has been a lot!

Update: Earlier versions of this post referred to the pre-KubeCon Bug Bash. Unfortunately we had to cancel our participation.

News in the Flux family

Latest Flux release series is 0.29

This is the latest and greatest, but before we get into the list of great features and improvements, let’s take a look at the breaking changes beforehand:

  • From this release on, the RUNTIME_NAMESPACE environment variable is no longer taken into account to configure the advertised HTTP/S address of the storage. Instead, variable substitution must be used, as described in the changelog entry for v0.5.2.
  • Use of file-based KubeConfig options are now permanently disabled (e.g. TLSClientConfig.CAFile, TLSClientConfig.KeyFile, TLSClientConfig.CertFile and BearerTokenFile). The drive behind the change was to discourage insecure practices of mounting Kubernetes tokens inside the controller’s container file system.
  • Use of TLSClientConfig.Insecure in KubeConfig file is disabled by default, but can be enabled at controller level with the flag --insecure-kubeconfig-tls.
  • Use of ExecProvider in KubeConfig file is now disabled by default, but can be enabled at controller level with the flag --insecure-kubeconfig-exec.

With that out of the way, here are the highlights of the release:

Notification Improvements

A new notification is now emitted to identify recovery from failures. It is triggered when a failed reconciliation is followed by a successful one.

In-memory cache for HelmRepository

An opt-in in-memory cache for HelmRepository that addresses issues where the index file is loaded and unmarshalled in concurrent reconciliation resulting in a heavy memory footprint. It can be configured using the flags: --helm-cache-max-size, --helm-cache-ttl, --helm-cache-purge-interval.

Configurable retention of Source Artifacts

Garbage Collection is enabled by default, and now its retention options are configurable with the flags: --artifact-retention-ttl (default: 60s) and --artifact-retention-records (default: 2). They define the minimum time to live and the maximum amount of artifacts to survive a collection.

Configurable Key Exchange Algorithms for SSH connections

Using the flag --ssh-kex-algos. Note this applies to the go-git gitImplementation or the libgit2 gitImplementation but only when Managed Transport is being used.

Configurable Exponential Back-off retry settings

With the new flags: --min-retry-delay (default: 750ms) and --max-retry-delay (default: 15min). Previously the defaults were set to 5ms and 1000s, which in some cases impaired the controller’s ability to self-heal (e.g. retrying failing SSH connections).

Experimental managed transport for libgit2 Git implementation

Now has self-healing capabilities, to recover from failure when long-running connections become stale.

SOPS refactored and optimized

Including various improvements and extended code coverage. Age identities are now imported once and reused multiple times, optimizing CPU and memory usage between decryption operations.

Helm chart directory loader improvements

Introduction of a secure directory loader which improves the handling of Helm charts paths.

For a more detailed list of changes in the series, please refer to the change logs of 0.29.0, 0.29.1, 0.29.2, 0.29.3, 0.29.4, and 0.29.5.

Flagger 1.20.0

This release comes with improvements to the AppMesh, Contour and Istio integrations.

Improvements

  • AppMesh: Add annotation to enable Envoy access logs #1156
  • Contour: Update the httproxy API and enable RetryOn #1164
  • Istio: Add destination port when port discovery and delegation are true #1145
  • Metrics: Add canary analysis result as Prometheus metrics #1148

Fixes

  • Fix canary rollback behaviour #1171
  • Shorten the metric analysis cycle after confirm promotion gate is open #1139
  • Fix unit of time in the Istio Grafana dashboard #1162
  • Fix the service toggle condition in the podinfo helm chart #1146

Flux Ecosystem

Flux Subsystem for Argo

In the latest release, we have added checkboxes to enable Flux Subsystem in the Argo CD UI. We also have a tutorial to use TF-controller with Flux Subsystem for Argo. With this you have an alternative option to Crossplane to manage infrastructure.

Terraform-controller

We have released TF-controller v0.9.4 which is a bug-fix release. We also added cloud cost estimation to our road map. Please feel free to give us feedback on how you would like this feature to be:

Weave GitOps

Weave GitOps is a powerful, open source extension to Flux, which provides insights into your deployments, and makes continuous delivery with GitOps easier to adopt and scale across your teams. You can easily install alongside an existing Flux setup, adding (or removing) Weave GitOps as a standard Helm resource.

The v0.8.0 release brings multi-namespace querying so you can see objects from across your cluster in the Web UI, several UI enhancements and bug fixes, as well as supporting the Source v1beta2 API - this breaking change means we now require Flux v0.29.0 or later.

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 April here are a couple of talks we would like to highlight:

Managing Thousands of Clusters and Their Workloads with Max Jonas Werner D2iQ uses Flux to automatically enable this experience in its products. Join Max for this hands-on session on multi-cluster management using GitOps.

CNCF on-demand webinar: Flux for Helm Users with Scott Rigby Scott Rigby, Flux & Helm Maintainer, takes you on a tour of Flux’s Helm Controller, shares the additional benefits Flux adds to Helm and then walks through a live demo of how to manage helm releases using Flux.

Women In GitOps Panel We celebrated international women’s day, GitOps Style. This event gathered female role models who innovate, challenge and embrace the world of GitOps. Inspirational women who have achieved great success within the sector and will share stories of their journey and explore the question why is it important to “Get on GitOps.”

Securing GitOps Debug Access with Flux, Pinniped, Dex, & GitHub with Leigh Capili In this live demo, Leigh will show how the incredibly flexible, open-source combo of Flux, Pinniped, and Dex can empower a team to leave a traceable solution during a production incident. He explores effective team debugging habits with Kubernetes and git.

Security: The Value of SBOMs with Dan Luhring (Anchore) During this session, Dan Luhring, OSS Engineering Manager at Anchore, dives into SBOMs - what they are, why you need them, some common use cases and how to get your pipeline ready for SBOM generation and verification using the Flux SBOM as an example.

OpenSource 101: WTF is GitOps & Why Should You Care? with Priyanka Ravi Pinky shares from personal experience why GitOps has been an essential part of achieving a best-in-class delivery and platform team, gives a brief overview of definitions, CNCF-based principles, and Flux’s capabilities: multi-tenancy, multi-cluster, (multi-everything!), for apps and infra, and more.

From Zero to GitOps Heroes with Mae Large, Russ Parmer, & Priyanka Ravi During this session Mae, Pinky, & Riss share key learnings from their early days of assessing GitOps as an idea and methodology to how it evolved into the de facto automated software change process in less than 1 year.

Upcoming Events 📆

We are happy to announce that we have a number of events coming up in May - 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.

KubeCon / CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 coming up

As every other project in the Cloud Natice space, we are very busy preparing everything for KubeCon / CloudNativeCon Europe 2022, which is going to be 16-20 May 2022 in Valencia, Spain (and virtual of course!).

We will post a separate announcement as soon as everything is confirmed, but we already want to inform you about what’s likely to happen, so you can plan accordingly or collaborate with us!

The Bug Bash

Unfortunately we will not be participating in the Bug Bash this KubeCon!

Despite earlier announcements claiming we would do this, we felt we could not do this well enough. If you were looking forward to this, we are sorry - but you know what: we still have the weekly Bug Scrub! Your weekly one-on-one mentoring to learn the ropes of working on Flux!

Monday, 16 May

13:00 - 17:00 (Room 2H - Event Center): Flux Project Meeting: We will kick off the Flux get-togethers and festivities with an in-person meeting for all Flux users, contributors, maintainers and generally interested folks. This will be an opportunity to get to know each other, have a chat, see what people’s interests are and to potentially start contributing. ( Sign up here.) Contact people on the ground are: Scott Rigby, Somtochi Onyekwere and Stefan Prodan.

Join Flux Maintainers Stefan Prodan, Somtochi Onyekwere & Scott Rigby for this Flux Project Meeting in-person at KubeCon EU on Monday, May 16 from 1pm - 5pm CEST

Click here to register ( here) for the Flux Project Meeting. Please note that you must be a KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe ( here) registrant in order to attend this meeting.

Details Flux Project Meeting Monday, May 16, 13:00 - 17:00 CEST Room 2H | Event Center

Space is limited Please note: we will not have any live streaming, recordings, or any virtual component available for this meeting.

Tuesday 17 May - GitOpsCon

Lots and lots of talks about GitOps in general and Flux in particular, here’s a short selection of what to look forward to:

Wednesday 18 May - Friday May 20 - KubeCon

Over these three days we are going to be at the Flux booth (both virtually and on the ground), so come over for a chat. We are planning loads of talks, demos and ample time to have a chat, get to know everyone, ask questions and have great new ideas together!

On top of that, here is a list of talks, workshops and sessions during those days:

Please note: all of the above might be subject to change. Please double-check the schedule beforehand. Please reach out to Vanessa Abankwah or Daniel Holbach on Slack if you have questions or would like to participate in any of the above.

We very much look forward to seeing you there!

GitOps Days 2022

GitOps Days 2022 is a free 2-day online event on June 8-9, 2022.

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

What to expect?

  • 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
  • Music from DJ Desired State 🎶

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! ✍

Manage Kubernetes Secrets for Flux with HashiCorp Vault

Rosemary Wang from HashiCorp wrote a great blog post about how to manage Kubernetes Secrets for Flux with HashiCorp Vault. The how-to is nicely written with a lot of detail and will take you through the steps to configure the Secrets Store CSI driver with HashiCorp Vault to securely inject secrets into Flux or other GitOps tools on Kubernetes.

We are looking forward to more collaboration together!

Full GitOps Tutorial: Getting started with Flux

This video is great for everyone who gets started, but also everyone who enjoys a story well-told.

In this video, Anais Urlichs covers

  • What is GitOps and how does Flux work
  • Flux installation
  • Managing Helm Charts with Flux
  • Managing Kubernetes Manifests with Flux
  • Setting up alerts with Flux

Anais also sat down wrote this all up in blog-post from.

How To Apply GitOps To Everything Using Crossplane And Flux

Viktor Farcic has done it again - check out this great video where he shows how to leverage the extensibility of Crossplane and Flux features to apply GitOps not only to applications running in Kubernetes but to everything (infrastructure, services, applications running anywhere, etc.)

Encrypted gitops secrets with flux and age

Major Hayden wrote a nice article about how to get encrypted gitops secrets with flux and age right.

Here you will learn how to store encrypted kubernetes secrets safely in your GitOps repository with easy-to-use age encryption. 🔐

Basic authentication with Traefik on kubernetes

Another post from Major Hayden! This time about Basic authentication with Traefik on kubernetes.

It’s nicely detailed and will take you through all the steps to keep prying eyes away from your sites behind Traefik with basic authentication. 🛃

Automated Canary Deployments with Rancher Fleet and Flagger

In this video, Lukonde Mwila will demonstrate how to execute automated canary deployments with Rancher Fleet and Flagger.

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: Stackspin, Maersk and Rungway.

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

  • If you always wanted to join Team Flux and weren’t quite sure how, please read our blog post Contributing to Flux and say Hi on Slack!
  • Many mobile UI fixes!
  • Add flux-subsystem-argo/flamingo and weaveworks/vscode-gitops-tools to the Flux Ecosystem page.
  • New videos under Flux Resources! 😍
  • Various docs fixes.
  • And here is a big one: we moved all docs from https://flagger.app into https://fluxcd.io/flagger - this is part of a bigger move to subsume all of our documentation and web-presence into one place, so we won’t have to maintain too many pieces of infrastructure.
    This has been on our to-do list since Flux became a CNCF Incubating project. Now that we are going for Graduation, we finally got around to doing it.

Thanks a lot to these folks who contributed to docs and website: Ihor Sychevskyi, Kingdon Barrett, Stefan Prodan, Endre Czirbesz, Maarten de Waard and Patrick Rodies.

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!

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 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.