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March 2023 Update

The latest Flux brings performance improvements and Helm-related features. Our Ecosystem is growing (timoni) and sees lots of activity. Meet us at KubeCon - lots of opportunities to meet up. New Flux adopters join us and lots more happening!
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 April 2023 - let’s recap together what happened in March - it has been a lot!

News in the Flux family

We have released Flux v0.41 with new features and improvements. As always, everyone is encouraged to upgrade for the best experience.

Here is a short-list of features and improvements in this release:

  • Experimental support of drift detection of Helm releases compared to cluster-state.
  • Improved handling of SIGTERM signals received by the helm-controller, which will now terminate running Helm install or upgrade actions, instead of potentially leaving them in a pending state.
  • Opt-in OOM watcher in helm-controller to handle graceful termination of the controller before it is forcefully killed by Kubernetes’ OOM killer.
  • Kubernetes client and Custom Resource Definition life-cycle improvements to reduce the memory consumption of the helm-controller, with observed reductions up to 50%.
  • Opt-in allowance of DNS lookups during the rendering of Helm templates in the helm-controller via feature gate.
  • Optional disabling of the cache of the status poller used to determine the health of the resources applied by the kustomize-controller. This may improve memory usage on large scale clusters at the cost of more direct API calls.
  • Changes to the logging of all controllers to ensure Kubernetes components like the discovery client use the configured logging format.
  • New flux events command to display Kubernetes events for Flux resources, including the events of a referenced resource.
  • Custom annotations can now be set with flux push using --annotations.

It’s important to us to document all the new features, so here goes a list of new articles and how-tos:

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

Flux Ecosystem

Weave GitOps

Weave GitOps Enterprise v0.19.0 brings a host of new features to help the Flux community streamline their workflows and improve overall efficiency. The GitOpsSets GUI makes it easier to manage applications across a fleet of clusters, while additional generators like cluster, gitRepository, and apiClient offer enhanced functionality and customization. Weave GitOps Enterprise now supports raw templating for greater flexibility, and the Sandbox environments provide real-time visibility and testing capabilities for Kubernetes infrastructure.

New additions to the PolicyConfig UI simplify policy management, and the SOPS Secrets features enable seamless GPG and AGE key management, making it easier than ever to create encrypted secrets. Experience the benefits of adopting Weave GitOps by leveraging these powerful new features for Kubernetes environments.

Weave GitOps Enterprise v0.19

Terraform-controller

The team has been working on the new release of Terraform controller. Bug fixes related to the GitOps dependency management have been landed in the main branch. So please feel free to try it out.

The team has also been working closely with the Flux team to ensure that Terraform controller will support everything in the coming Flux GA.

Flux Subsystem for Argo

Flamingo, the Flux Subsystem for Argo, for ArgoCD 2.6 and Flux v0.41, has been released. Flamingo is the only tool that combines the best two GitOps technologies together. Flux and ArgoCD are both CNCF graduate projects.

This new Flamingo version includes support for the following:

  • Flux v0.41 which comes with many features and enhancements,
  • Pack of new user interface features from ArgoCD 2.6

Chanwit Kaekwasi, the main developer of Flamingo, is looking for feedback. If you use Flamingo and want to chat about how you use it, where you would like it to go or just want to give some feedback, please find him on the #flux channel on CNCF Slack. Thanks a lot in advance!

VS Code GitOps Extension

Version 0.24.0 of the VS Code extension was released. This version introduces a new feature for the users of Weave GitOps Enterprise: Templates. Using Templates users can create complex GitOps configurations, workflows and pipelines with a simple UI. Templates must be enabled in the VS Code settings to be available. The README file includes further information.

The team is continuing to work on UI and performance improvements. In the 0.24 release, the Sources and Workloads views are now grouped by Namespaces and their details are presented in a consistent way.

New additions to the Flux Ecosystem

We are very happy to see Timoni joining the Flux Ecosystem.

Timoni is a package manager for Kubernetes, powered by CUE and inspired by Helm.

The Timoni project strives to improve the UX of authoring Kubernetes configs. Instead of mingling Go templates with YAML like Helm, or layering YAML on top of each-other like Kustomize, Timoni relies on cuelang’s type safety, code generation and data validation features to offer a better experience of creating, packaging and delivering apps to Kubernetes.

Timoni can be used together with Flux to create a GitOps delivery pipeline for Timoni’s module instances.

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

Kubernetes co-founder Brendan Burns and Flux maintainer Stefan Prodan recently gave a CNCF talk on #ubernetes in 2023.

Monolith to Microservices with Bite-Sized Kubernetes.

Cloud Native Live: Automating Kubernetes Deployments.

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 April - tune in to learn more about Flux and GitOps best practices, get to know the team and join our community.

CloudNativeCon / KubeCon EU 2023

CloudNativeCon / KubeCon EU 2023

We are very excited! From Tuesday, April 18 through Friday, April 21 it is CloudNativeCon / KubeCon EU 2023 in Amsterdam.

At the time of writing all the tickets have been sold out, so if you managed to get one, we look forward to seeing you there! Let’s dig into what’s happening over all of the days, because it is a lot.

Here is the link to our mini-website to keep you up to date at all times.

Tuesday, April 18

This is where CloudNativeCon starts and we are happy to have representation at a number of Day-0 events.

In the afternoon, starting at 13:00 (1pm), we start our Flux Project Gathering in Room G108 of the Auditorium Center. A lot of Flux maintainers and contributors will be there to chat with and we have a nice programme prepared for you.

  • 1:00 pm Meet and Greet
  • 1:15 pm Welcome and Overview of Flux activities at KubeCon
  • 1:30 pm Intro to GitOps and Flux + Q&A (Priyanka “Pinky” Ravi)
  • 2:00 pm What’s New with Flux! Overview (Flux team)
    • Flux GA Release is coming up! What does that mean for you?
    • Graduation and other updates!
    • Contributing to Flux
  • 3:00 pm Q&A time
  • 3:15 pm Break
  • 3:30 pm Flux & Other Tools
    • Terraform (Pinky)
    • Vault (Pinky)
    • Helm (Hidde Beydals)
    • VS Code (Juozas Gaigalas)
    • Secrets & Sops (Hidde)
    • Cosign (Stefan)
    • Plus lots of time for Q&A!
  • 4:45 pm Closing: Thanks and final questions
Wednesday, April 19
  • 10:30 - 21:00 (9pm): Meet the Flux team at our booth at the Project Pavilion
    at Project Pavilion, Kiosk 3
  • 11:00 - 11:35: A CI/CD Platform in the Palm of Your Hand
    Claudia Beresford, Weaveworks at Elicium Building, D201-202
  • 11:55 - 12:30: Flux Beyond Git: Harnessing the Power of OCI
    Stefan Prodan & Hidde Beydals, Weaveworks at Forum Center, E103-E104
  • 18:00 (6pm) - 20:00 (8pm): Meet the Flux team at our booth for the Booth Crawl
    at Project Pavilion, Kiosk 3

Update: previously the OCI talk was scheduled to happen at 17:25. 11:55 is correct.

Thursday, April 20
  • 10:30 - 17:30 (5.30pm): Meet the Flux team at our booth at the Project Pavilion
    at Project Pavilion, Kiosk 3
  • 16:00 - 16:30 (4.30pm): Flux Project Graduation Celebration
    in Hall 5
Friday, April 21

Update: previously the time for the panel was 16:55, it has been moved to 14:55.

Flux Bug Scrub

The Flux Bug Scrub has undertaken a slightly new format, where we’ll be spending more time working on our own code, and even building some new software under the aegis of the “flux-community” organization! We’ll still have our familiar spreadsheet every week, but we will be conversely spending less time per-meeting on curating the list of issues across the FluxCD org than we have been.

The Bug Scrub community is small but growing; we need your feedback to make this effort a blockbuster hit (which you can provide asynchronously, please remember to @ KingdonB if you are interested, whether you can or cannot make the meeting time!)

Since we’ll be spending more time on code at the meeting, we are also evaluating the possibility of a new, more inclusive “Late Late” Bug Scrub, which would aim to be more accessible to people in the Asia/Pacific time zones, Australia, as well as those in Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa. We hope that there are some folks who might not have been able to make the earlier times, who could benefit from this new addition. If you are in these time zones which are not covered now, it’ll actually be “Early Work Hours” for you if we’ve calibrated this correctly. (Good morning, Internet…)

The addition of another meeting at a new time of day, is intended to provide a little extra time for the curation of issues to go along with our new format change, and also to balance the scales somewhat better across all regions. Now, we just need your feedback and RSVP to decide exactly what time this new meeting should be! Please check out the FluxCD calendar for an indication of when it has been scheduled, or ping KingdonB in the Flux channel on CNCF slack if you have a strong opinion on the matter!

The next dates are going to be:

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! ✍

blakyaks.com: AKS & Flux via Terraform

Flux Adopters BlakYaks wrote this nice article in which they explain how to bring Flux to AKS via Terraform. In closing they say:

Hopefully by now you’ve got an idea of why we’re big advocates of GitOps workflows and, in particular, Flux.

The convention-based approach allows us to build complex application deployments with ease, and by leveraging source control best practices such as pull requests and branch policy we can quickly integrate deployments into our existing CI/CD toolchains in a secure and scalable manner.

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: BlakYaks, Enliven Systems, Kratix, MyTaxi, ScaleAq, Szerzi and TrueLayer

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:

  • Update of fluxcd.io landing page: we removed the terminal as it had been outdated and slowed down the loading time. We also simplified our messaging about Flux features and mission so it’s easier to understand at a glance.
  • We restructured our use of shortblocks, so the code structure is more straight-forward.
  • We applied for Google Season of Docs 2023. If you are interested in the initiative, go and check out the link.
  • We added information about to enable Helm drift detection and how to allow Helm DNS lookups.

And on top of that countless fixes, small improvements and updates as always. Thanks a lot to these folks who contributed to docs and website: Stefan Prodan, Hidde Beydals, Arhell, Max Jonas Werner, Andreas Olsen Gulla, Craig Hurt, Gangstead, Jake, KwongTN, Matteo Martellini, Metin OSMAN, Sanskar Jaiswal, Timo Furrer and zoltan.zvara.

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, fully integrates with OCI 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. ✨ Dashboards love Flux: No matter if you use one of the Flux UIs or a hosted cloud offering from your cloud vendor, Flux has a thriving ecosystem of integrations and products built on top of it and all have great dashboards for you.
  8. 📞 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.
  9. 👍 Users trust Flux: Flux is a CNCF Graduated project and was categorised as “Adopt” on the CNCF CI/CD Tech Radar (alongside Helm).
  10. 💖 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.