August 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 July - even though a lot of us took some much needed holidays, a lot has been happening!

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 an 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. 💖 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.

This section has made it onto the landing page of https://fluxcd.io now - let us know how you like it!

News in the Flux family

Controller refactoring coming up

If you have been following the repositories under the fluxcd organisation on Github, you will have noticed that its actually the *-controller projects which provide the functionality of Flux. Their names should be fairly self-explanatory: “source”, “helm”, “kustomize”, “notifications” and so on.

We had many contributors jump in and help since we started the big Flux rewrite, but we noticed that the learning curve was a little steep and everybody spent a little too much time learning how the controllers interacted, and similar concepts.

Hidde Beydals recently sat down and implemented helper functions which will aid in unifying codebases and settings standards across all Flux Controllers. The bulk of this work has landed under pkg/runtime. Its README does a pretty good job explaining the helper functions and important considerations.

Here we want to give a big shout-out to the Cluster API project, as for example the conditions and patch packages were heavily inspired by the project’s work!

The idea behind this was to

• Reduce duplication of code
• Reduce a certain subset of race condition related bugs in Flux controllers
• Make writing e2e tests much easier and uniform
• Make maintaining Flux controllers easier for others to help with
• Make writing new controllers much clearer process (help widen ecosystem of controllers built on the GitOps Toolkit)
• Make us feel more comfortable in the code

Check out the most recent version of Go reference documentation here: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/fluxcd/pkg/runtime@v0.13.0-rc.2.

The overall plan is:

• If you are proficient in Go and have some experience with controller-runtime this might be straight up your alley. If you are interested in learning more about it, you might want to get started with this Kubebuilder tutorial.
• Review the pkg/runtime reference docs.
• Review how these new helper functions are used to standardize Source Controller in this Pull Request.
• Based on those patterns, work together on a per-pattern, per controller Pull Request.

Track the wider effort by subscribing to these issues:

• https://github.com/fluxcd/flux2/issues/1601
• https://github.com/fluxcd/flux2/issues/1602

If you would like to help out in the refactoring work, please reach out to Scott Rigby on Slack.

Flux migration news

In last month’s update we discussed how Flux’s APIs are now stable. To clarify what this means for the Flux project as a whole, we added the following section to our migration timetable:

• Flux 1: Superseded

  • All existing projects encouraged to migrate to Flux 2, and report any bugs
  • Flux 1 Helm Operator code freeze – no further updates except CVEs

• Flux 2 CLI: Needs further testing, may get breaking changes

  • CLI needs further user testing during this migration period

• GitOps Toolkit APIs and Controllers

  • All Beta, Production Ready
    The GOTK Custom Resource Definitions which are at v1beta1 and v2beta1 and their controllers are considered stable and production ready. Going forward, breaking changes to the beta CRDs will be accompanied by a conversion mechanism.
  • All Flux 1 features stable and supported in Flux 2
  • Promoting Alpha versions to Beta makes this Production Ready

Reach out to us if you have any questions about this!

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.

Flux Bug Scrub

Our Flux Bug Scrub event is now a regular feature, with the current scheduling information available on the CNCF Flux Dev Calendar, usually scheduled opposite the CNCF Flux Project Meeting. You can subscribe to the calendar to receive notifications about upcoming events and schedule changes. The Bug Scrub is an opportunity to meet with other Flux contributors in another setting besides the Dev meeting, where we try to identify “Good First Issues” and spend an hour working on issue triage as a group. These meetings are open to the general public, so individuals of any skill level are welcome.

The theme and focus of the Bug Scrub can vary from week to week; we are floating the idea of doing an FAQ scrub or Docs scrub, where instead of reviewing issues and doing triage on PRs, we comb through recent Slack history and try to find new Frequently Asked Questions that we can add to the docs, in order to save the Flux team from writing out the same replies longhand every time a question is asked again. Many folks are coming to the Bug Scrub just to learn more about Flux and for a window into Flux current events.

One goal of this event is to convert Flux users into Flux contributors, so we will try to make sure that all attendees who are interested in making a contribution get an issue assignment before the end of the event. We hope that you will join us for a Bug Scrub some time soon.

For details and more information about the Flux Bug Scrub, how it works, and what you need to do in order to participate: please read and review the Bug Scrub Process/Protocol doc, or revisit the blog post that announced our First Bug Scrub. Remember to find current scheduling information on the CNCF Flux Dev Calendar, and stay tuned for more info!

GitOpsCon North America

Still a little further down the line, GitOpsCon North America is happening October 12, 2021 as a Day-0 Event leading up to CloudNativeCon/KubeCon in Los Angeles, California + Virtually of course.

GitOpsCon North America (#GitOpsCon) is designed to foster collaboration, discussion and knowledge sharing on GitOps. This event is aimed at audiences that are new to GitOps as well as those currently using GitOps within their organization. Get connected with others that are passionate about GitOps. Learn from practitioners about pitfalls to avoid, hurdles to jump, and how to adopt GitOps in your cloud native environment.

The event is vendor-neutral and is being organized by the CNCF GitOps Working Group. Topics include getting started with GitOps, scaling and managing GitOps, lessons learned from production deployments, technical sessions, and thought leadership.

The schedule is not yet available, but will be soon. Now is a good time though to register.

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

In other news

Flux User Interviews

As a community we want to share our success stories more, so Scott Rigby and Daniel Holbach will soon start reaching out to folks who use Flux, who built solutions on top of Flux or do advocacy for Flux. If you were involved in any of these things, or know of an interesting story we should be telling to inspire, celebrate and teach others, please let us know. We want to reach far and wide and paint Flux’s community as colourful and diverse as it is!

News from the Website and our Docs

We updated to a new version of the docsy theme, which gives us more short-codes we can use to express ourselves in our documentation. Alison also improved the ways tabs look as you can see here:

Alison also put quite a bit of work into writing up how we want our documents to look and which short-codes are most useful. This should make it much easier if you want to start contributing documentation for Flux.

In the FAQ section, Hendrik Ferber explained how to patch CoreDNS and other pre-installed addons.

Additionally, to give some of the success stories Flux users have shared more room, we added this section to the landing page of https://fluxcd.io - if you have more, we are all ears!

Many others helped us improve the site and docs in other ways - thanks to everyone!

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 2021-08-04 12:00 UTC, or 2021-08-12, 15:00 UTC.
• 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.

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