September 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 August - there has been so much 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 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. 💖 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

Flux 0.17.0

We have released Flux v0.17.0. You will be pleased to learn that this version has no breaking changes. We encourage all users to upgrade ASAP.

Some of the highlights in this release are:

• Flux garbage collector has been improved to work nicely with other controllers such as Strimzi Kafka Operator, Redis Operator, Prometheus Operator and others.
• The Notification controller can now send alerts to Telegram, Lark and Matrix in addition to many others.
• Kustomize controller has been updated to on a par with the latest Kustomize release v4.3.0.

Some of our community members have stepped up their level of contributions recently and particularly in this release. On that we would like to congratulate Somtochi Onyekwere for becoming a maintainer of the Flux notification controller (more below)! Thanks Somtochi for all your contributions to the Flux project.

Also a big shout-out to Allen Porter and Chanwit Kaewkasi for helping us with the Flux CLI testing framework!

Flagger 1.13.0

This Flagger release comes with support for Open Service Mesh. For more details see the OSM Progressive Delivery tutorial.

Starting with this version, Flagger container images are signed with sigstore/cosign, for more details see the Flagger cosign docs.

Flux is in the Operator Hub

We are excited to tell you that Flux Operator is now on the Operator Hub, and it supports Red Hat OpenShift version 4.6, 4.7, and 4.8. Flux Operator for OpenShift could be installed directly via the OpenShift web console on the Operators tab. It also works on OKD, the Community Distribution that powers OpenShift.

Flux on OpenShift Features

• One-click installation
• Automatically Upgrade
• UI for Flux Resources

The Flux Operator for OpenShift provides a UI for all Flux Resources.

In the following example, you see the UI of GitRepository, which could create a new GitRepository object as a source for other objects.

Please consult the Flux OpenShift documentation for the installation steps.

If you have any questions or feedback, please reach out to Chanwit or Kingdon on Slack.

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 Bug Scrub

Many Flux users and contributors have found the Bug Scrub a helpful meet-up, including some maintainers and repeat visitors. The Bug Scrub event is a weekly Zoom call where we discuss open issues from the Flux org on GitHub, with a narrow focus on what we can do to help advance each issue in the shortest amount of time. We aim to get more exposure to the greatest possible number of open issues and set some time aside for story telling. As Flux development moves very fast there is always plenty to talk about.

The Bug Scrub format was designed to spread more Flux knowledge to more people who are interested in finding their own way toward contributing to Flux each week. We spend a few minutes talking about issues with minimal structure meant only to prevent back-tracking or repeating any of the discussions from one week to the next. You do not have to be a programmer to participate; any Flux users at any knowledge level, issue reporters, or potential contributors should feel welcome to attend. Take your opportunity to participate and help build our community. The time commitment is minimal!

Find our calendar on the Flux website where, thanks to some updates, finding the date and time of the next Bug Scrub meeting is now more accessible than ever before.

The Zoom link is broadcast via Slack a few minutes before the meeting start time. For more event details, subscribe to the CNCF Flux Dev calendar. Attendees all are asked to RSVP in advance, which can be done by posting on the Slack thread for Bug Scrub, and introducing yourself briefly in case you are new to the Flux contributor team.

Please consider joining #flux on the CNCF Slack and meeting us for Bug Scrub. Hope to see you there!

In other news

News from the Website and our Docs

📹 Resources and videos: As a community we are not only very proud that the Flux projects keep innovating and improving, but also that community members go out there and talk about how they are using the tools and what they achieved.

The list of talks and resources formerly was quite buried on the site - they now have their own page and can shine there: https://fluxcd.io/resources/

If you prefer learning about Flux through videos, you might enjoy this!

📆 Our calendar: From now on all upcoming Flux-related events, meetings, workshops and sessions will be mentioned in our new calendar section - directly on the home page: https://fluxcd.io/#calendar

For this we re-use Flux’s calendar that is provided by CNCF infrastructure, so if you subscribed to it in the past, you will continue to receive all the information there.

🤝 Thanks everyone! In the last month, 15 people contributed to the website and docs - we are very pleased with all the attention to detail and help from everyone. Thanks a lot - let us know if there’s anything you would like to see improve or help out with!

Somtochi Onyekwere joins Flux maintainers

We are very pleased to see Somtochi Onyekwere join the list of maintainers of Flux projects. Since she started working on Flux projects, she has by now contributed to almost all repositories. Most recently she worked on notification-controller and got it to talk to various other notification providers.

Before Flux she worked within the Cluster Addons projects in the Kubernetes SIG Cluster Lifecycle. Check out her write-up about the Google Summer of Code project 2020.

Thanks a lot for all your hard work Somtochi - we are very happy to have you on the team!

People writing about Flux

A new instalment of the Falcosidekick series has been written by Batuhan Apaydın. This series is all about how to create a Kubernetes response engine with Falco, Falcosidekick and a FaaS. Guest star this time around is Flux!

The article takes a step-by-step approach and is nicely written. We are very pleased to continue the collaboration with the Falco project. Check out the full article here: https://falco.org/blog/falcosidekick-response-engine-part-8-fluxv2/

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 2021-09-01 12:00 UTC, or 2021-09-09, 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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