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November 2022 Update

Flux graduates within the CNCF. Flux consolidates Git implementation. Flux GA Roadmap updates. New Flagger releases. Ecosystem updates. KubeCon Review and lots more community 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 December 2022 - let’s recap together what happened in November - it has been a lot!

News in the Flux family

Flux has graduated

Flux is CNCF Graduated project

It’s been quite the journey, and it wouldn’t have been possible without everybody’s help in our community. We made it! Flux is now officially a CNCF Graduated project. Here are some news pieces you might want to check out:

Please help us share the good news - it’s the moment of recognition and endorsement many have still been waiting for!

Also please join us for our celebratory Flux Graduation AMA sessions:

Next Flux release brings consolidated Git implementation

The Flux development team keeps on innovating. The latest release is Flux v0.37 and as always we encourage you all to upgrade for the best experience.

The biggest change is that the gitImplementation field of GitRepository by source-controller and image-automation-controller is now deprecated. Flux will effectively always use go-git. This now supports all Git servers, including Azure DevOps and AWS CodeCommit, which previously were only supported by libgit2. This is a big improvement and will help us focus on making Flux work great with just one git implementation.

Here is our shortlist of features and improvements in the release:

  • Support for bootstrapping Azure DevOps and AWS CodeCommit repositories using flux bootstrap git.
  • Support cloning of Git v2 protocol (Azure DevOps and AWS CodeCommit) for go-git Git provider.
  • Support force-pushing ImageUpdateAutomation repositories.
  • Allow a dry-run of flux build kustomization with --dry-run and --kustomization-file ./path/to/local/my-app.yaml. Using these flags, variable substitutions from Secrets and ConfigMaps are skipped, and no connection to the cluster is made.
  • Use signed OCI Helm chart for kube-prometheus-stack.

Check out these new pieces of documentation:

💖 Big thanks to all the Flux contributors that helped us with this release!

Flux Roadmap Updates

Here’s an update from the Flux roadmap - we are rushing forward towards GA!

Starting with release v0.37, we started solidifying all required changes for the Bootstrap GA milestone targeted to Q1 2023. That release should include all major changes from a Git perspective that we want to ship for GA. Please make sure you upgrade as soon as possible and provide us with feedback, so we can work on it before the GA release.

Upcoming in the next release is a new feature for Image Automation Controller: GitShallowClones. You can already check it out in the recently published release candidate. If you are interested, you can reach out via the PR or on Slack: https://github.com/fluxcd/image-automation-controller/pull/463

Security news

To benefit from our strong OCI integration, you might want to take a look at our latest blog post about how to verify the integrity of Helm charts stored as OCI artifacts.

To help you tighten security, the Kubernetes community has released the security-profiles-operator project. We are very pleased that it now comes with an AppArmor profile for Flux.

Flagger 1.25 and 1.26 update to newest Gateway API

Flagger 1.26.0 comes with support Kubernetes Gateway API v1beta1. For more details see the Gateway API Progressive Delivery tutorial. Please note that starting with this version, the Gateway API v1alpha2 is considered deprecated and will be removed from Flagger after 6 months.

Flagger 1.25.0 introduces a new deployment strategy combining Canary releases with session affinity for Istio. Check out the tutorial here. Furthermore, it contains a regression fix regarding metadata in alerts introduced in #1275.

Flux Ecosystem

Flux Subsystem for Argo

The team upgraded Flux Subsystem for Argo aka Flamingo to support Flux v0.37 and Argo CD v2.5.3, v2.4.17, v2.3.11 and v2.2.16.

Terraform-controller

The team has released Weave TF-controller v0.13.1 and recently updated its Helm chart to v0.9.3. In this version, the team started shipping the AWS Package for TF-controller. The AWS Package is an OCI Image which contains a set of Terraform primitive modules that you can use out-of-the-box to provision your Terraform resources by describing them as YAML.Please visit the package repository for more information: https://github.com/tf-controller/aws-primitive-modules.

Weave GitOps

GitOps Run continues to be enhanced as an easy way to get started with Flux and GitOps, and now includes yaml validation for both Flux and core Kubernetes resources. The Weave GitOps UI for Flux is now able to support multiple instances of Flux on the same cluster, for when resource isolation strategies are in place, so you can see the health of all controllers in the Flux Runtime view.

Then in the Enterprise edition of Weave GitOps, the Pipelines feature is now enabled by default to help you automatically promote applications through a series of environments, and GitOpsTemplates continue to be enhanced as a generic self-service capability for building out an Internal Developer Platform.

VS Code GitOps Extension

In its latest pre-release of the extension a “Configure GitOps” workflow was introduced. It features a new unified user interface for creating Source and Workload and for attaching Workloads to Sources. It supports both Generic Flux and Azure Flux (Arc/AKS) cluster modes. In Azure mode, FluxConfig resources are created automatically (this can be disabled if the user wants Generic mode compatibility). Currently this feature is in the Extension Marketplace pre-release channel and supports GitRepository and Kustomization resources.

If you want a user-friendly UI for working with every type of Source and Workflow please check out this pre-release and give the team feedback!

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

Playlist: Flux at Prometheus Day, GitOpsCon, & KubeCon North America 2022

This playlist is a curated compilation of all Flux related talks from KubeCon / CloudNativeCon NA 2022 (Detroit) as well as the respective co-located events, Prometheus Day and GitOpsCon. We’ve also included a list of the individual videos below.

Prometheus Day North America 2022

GitOpsCon North America 2022

KubeCon North America 2022

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!

Upcoming Events 📆

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

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

Your Community Team

The Flux Community Team has been busy this month. We wrapped-up everything related to KubeCon, prepared the announcement of Flux Graduation and wrote this summary.

We would love your help, so if you are interested in joining a small team which handles Community and Communications of Flux, please join our meetings and introduce yourself!

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! ✍

Josh Carlisle wrote this blog post as a decision making help for people who are new to Cloud Native. He says

I came away with Flux offering some easier onboarding and boostrapping

and

I found Flux to better align with things that were important to me

Thanks for the shout-out!

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: Amesto Fortytwo, DataGalaxy, Divistant, DKB Deutsche Kreditbank AG, Housing Anywhere, synyx.

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:

Thanks a lot to these folks who contributed to docs and website: Stefan Prodan, Arhell, Vanessa Abankwah, David Harris, Sanskar Jaiswal, Batuhan Apaydın, Max Jonas Werner, André Kesser, Marko Petrovic, Matthieu Dufourneaud, Paul Lockaby, Paulo Gomes, Piotr Sobieszczański, Roberth Strand, Tarun Rajpurohit, husni6, surya.

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 Graduated 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.