February 2022 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 our last update here.

It’s the beginning of March 2022 - let’s recap together what happened in February - it has been a lot!

News in the Flux family

Latest Flux is 0.27

We have released Flux v0.27. This release comes with new features and improvements.

First of all, before you start the upgrade there are breaking changes to be aware of:

1. Flux custom resources require their names to follow the DNS label standard as defined in RFC 1123. The metadata.name can only contain lowercase alphanumeric characters or - and must contain at most 63 characters.
2. This version introduces a breaking change to the Helm uninstall behavior, as the --wait flag is now enabled by default. Resulting in helm-controller to wait for resources to be deleted while uninstalling a release. Disabling this behavior is possible by setting spec.uninstall.disableWait: true in HelmRelease manifests.

We have been hard at work and are proud to bring you these new features and improvements

• Add support to notification-controller for sending events to Grafana annotations API.
• Allow selecting event sources based on labels using the Alert API spec.eventSources[].matchLabels field.
• Add support to kustomize-controller for making the Kubernetes Secrets and ConfigMaps referenced in postBuild.substituteFrom optional.
• Allow dot-prefixed paths to be used for bootstrap e.g. flux bootstrap --path=".flux/clusters/my-cluster".
• All Flux controllers and libraries are now tested by Google’s continuous fuzzing for open source software.

Latest Flagger release is 1.18

This release comes with a new API field called canaryReadyThreshold that allows setting the percentage of pods that need to be available to consider the canary deployment as ready.

Starting with version, the canary deployment labels, annotations and replicas fields are copied to the primary deployment at promotion time.

Security news

Security Audit Feedback has been addressed

Back when we announced that the Flux Security Audit had concluded, we already shared that we had created a project board where we tracked all the concrete and immediately actionable feedback. Weighing in at fifty tasks of differing sizes, it took us about 2-3 months (depending if you count people’s holidays over New Years) to address all of them. It was a big team effort across teams, projects and disciplines. A big thank you again to everyone who contributed!

Some of these tasks are obviously an ongoing piece of work, for example ever expanding the scope of fuzzing, improving our security documentation and using our RFC process for defining the future of Flux together.

A big push has been made though and Flux is more secure since we all came together for this project.

Welcome to the Flux Security blog post series

If you read the release notes for the last Flux releases, you will notice that a big focus for us has been to make Flux more secure every time. As we believe it is equally important to explain in more detail what we have done and how you can benefit from these changes, we started a blog post series about Flux Security.

The value of SBOMs: Since the last releases we are also releasing “Software Bill of Materials” information, which can be easily parsed programmatically and be used in decision making processes about the software in use. Read the post to understand how SBOMs are constructed and the different scenarios in which they are useful and make you more secure.

Image Provenance: If you have been following news and discussions in the Cloud Native space, you will have noticed that this was a hot topic lately. In our post we explain why we sign all relevant release artifacts of ours, how you can verify the signatures and how to start integrating checks into policy engines such as Kyverno.

More confidence through Fuzzing: Since our first conversations with ADA Logics who performed the security audit on Flux, we knew we wanted to integrate Fuzzing into Flux at some stage. PRs with an initial implementation came together during the audit. When we got back from the holidays at the end of the year, we were able to start looking into this. First a number of changes needed to be made to our build infrastructure. After that we extended the scope of the Fuzzing implementation somewhat, so we knew that more code paths were covered. We are happy with what we landed in Flux. Check out the post to understand more of the thinking behind it and how to help out if you want to help us take this even further.

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.

Mar 2: Managing Thousands of Clusters & Their Workloads with Flux - Max Jonas Werner

One of the main goals of DevOps is to automate operations as much as possible. By automating most operations, DevOps can provide business agility and allow Developers to focus more on business applications. This allows operations to be more efficient by being less error-prone and repeatable, improving the overall developer experience. D2iQ uses Flux to automatically enable this experience in its products. Join us for a hands-on session on multi-cluster management using GitOps.

Mar 3: 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.

Mar 16: Securing GitOps Debug Access with Pinniped, Dex, GitHub, & Flux - 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. Let’s explore effective team debugging habits with Kubernetes and git.

Flux Bug Scrub

Since July 2021 Kingdon Barrett has been running Flux Bug Scrub events. The idea is essentially that every week Kingdon leads you on a one hour long guided journey through Flux issue gardening. If you can’t imagine what this should look like, take a look at the Flux Bug Scrub YouTube playlist and see for yourself.

The focus has always been on introducing new members of our community to the organisation of Flux projects, but also to start with simple issues, respond to users and start fixing the first issues on their own.

Last month continued to see weekly Bug Scrubs, always with pre-prepared bug lists to make it easier to track progress. For the next time, Kingdon is looking for co-hosts, so if you would like people to get involved in your area of Flux, please join the Bug Scrub crew! If you would like to be Kingdon’s shadow for some time - please join as well!

Upcoming Bug Scrubs:

• March 3 at 10am PT / 1pm ET
• March 9 at 1pm UTC / 2pm CET

In other news

Paulo Gomes joins the Flux maintainers

We are happy to have Paulo Gomes on board. He is Senior Software Engineer at Weaveworks and has been contributing to the Flux code for quite a while. Check out his membership application to get a sense of what he has contributed so far. Particularly in the areas of build, security and documentation we have a lot to be thankful for. He is a maintainer for source-controller and image-automation-controller now.

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: Anova, automotiveMastermind, Divid, Evrone, FACEIT, orchit GmbH, RingCentral and Volvo Cars.

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.

Flux Ecosystem page

We pride ourselves as a project that can very easily be adapted and integrated into a wide variety of use-cases. The Flux Ecosystem page is testament to that.

New joiners in the past month have been

• weaveworks/tf-controller - a Flux controller for managing Terraform resources
• jgz/s3-auth-proxy - which creates a simple basic-auth proxy for an s3 bucket
• tarioch/flux-check-hook - a pre-commit that validates values of HelmRelease using helm lint

If you are part of the Flux Ecosystem, we want you on that page as well!

Flux Data Flow diagrams

We are still in the process of tying this into our documentation nicely, but here is a sneak peak into diagrams which explain the data flow within Flux.

This was part of the work which came out of the Flux Security Audit, where one of the first requests was to make it easier to understand the information flow (and thus part of the architecture) at a first glance.

Please let us know how you like it!

More docs and website news

First of all: if you like what you are seeing on the website or in our docs - and maybe if you don’t like it either: if you would like to help us out, have feedback and ideas, please reach out to us. We really want to make our docs and website shine and are happy to receive any help or feedback!

Because we talked about writing regarding Flux a lot already, here is just a quick summary of everything that landed in the past month:

• We are introducing Flux Cheatsheets! The first one is all about Flux Bootstrap. If you have more to add, ideas or requests, hit us up on Slack or GitHub!
• We started addressing the first bits of feedback we received during our CNCF TechDocs Assessment. There is more to be done here, as we reported before, but we are on the ball and getting things moving.
• Many small fixes and improvements were landed including FAQ entries and more. We are especially pleased that many first-time contributors to Flux chose to contribute here and we know we have so many eyeballs on our documentation.
• Some docs which received particular attention this time around were
  • Flux Resources
  • Using Flux on OpenShift
  • Monitoring with Prometheus

Thanks a lot to these folks who contributed to docs and website: Adam Dickinson, akirillow, Chanwit Kaewkasi, Davi Garcia, Emanuele Massara, Emil Dabrowski, Filipe Sequeira, Hidde Beydals, Ivan Anisimov, Jonathan Mourtada, Jørn Fauske, Keith Petersen, Oliver Wiebeck, Patrick Cornelißen, Patrick Ruckstuhl, Ricardo Castro, Satyam Kapoor, Somtochi Onyekwere, Stacey Potter, Stefan Prodan, Sunny Gogoi and Tamao Nakahara.

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:

• Join our upcoming dev meetings on 2022-03-02 or 2022-03-10.
• 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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