The Road to Flux v2 - October update

[weaveworks]

The Flux community has set itself very ambitious goals for version 2 and as it’s a multi-month project we strive to inform you of what’s landed every month, including new possibilities that are available for integration and where you can get involved. Read last month’s update here.

Let’s recap what happened in September. There has been quite a lot.

Flux v1 is in maintenance mode

As already mentioned in the announcement of our Flux v2 and GitOps Toolkit plans, Flux v1 (and Helm Operator) are in maintenance mode and have been for a while. This means we are focusing all of our attention on v2 and we’ll only be working on Flux and Helm Operator v1 for critical updates and fixes. If you have important PRs that you want to land or if you are considering helping out with v1 maintenance, please talk to us. We want to make this transition work for everyone.

GitOps Toolkit about to reach a big milestone: 0.1.0

We have been working on the GitOps Toolkit for about six months and we have largely reached feature parity with Flux v1 (in read-only mode) and Helm Operator v1. The 0.1.0 milestone will mean that the APIs will be promoted to beta and that we will want more widespread testing and experimentation of Flux for those two sets of use-cases. Going forward, changes to the API will be accompanied by a conversion mechanism. With the v0.1 release the API becomes more stable but while in beta phase there are no guarantees about backwards compatibility between beta releases. We will also be working on migration paths and guides.

You can expect the release in the next couple of days and we would welcome any feedback you might have. Check out the “Get Started” guide (including others) on https://toolkit.fluxcd.io/.

This is a great achievement, so thanks a lot Bianca Cheng Costanzo, Daniel Holbach, Dinos Kousidis, Erik Hollensbe, Hidde Beydals, Ihor Dvoretskyi, Kevin McDermott, Leigh Capili, Lucas Käldström, Manuel Morejón, Martin H Berwanger, Michael Bridgen, Michael Cristina, Mike Beaumont, Philip Laine, Sara El-Zayat, Scott Rigby, Sean Eagan, Simon Howe, Stefan Prodan and Yiannis Triantafyllopoulos for your help thus far!

go-git-providers adding new maintainers and Gitlab support

Another Flux project that has seen new maintainers pick up the work is go-git-providers. Mike Beaumont, Simon Howe, Dinos Kousidis, Yiannis Triantafyllopoulos and Sara El-Zayat all work for Weaveworks and they stepped in to pick up where Lucas Käldström left off.

Dinos says:

“The project offers a common interface to run operations on different git providers. It defines an abstraction and mapping on repositories, organizations, and teams so that projects don't have to combine provider specific ones (go-github, go-gitlab, etc.). We just released 0.0.3 which adds the gitlab provider alongside the github one that was added by Lucas. A BitBucket provider is also being discussed.”

In other news

The list of improvements and new features is long, so check out the links below to find out more:

• We implemented S3 compatible storage in GOTK. On the premise of being able to implement features and complementary implementations using different APIs and service providers more easily, this will likely be useful for many.
• ARMv7 for the GitOps Toolkit has landed, this means it now works on Raspberry PI. A long standing feature request for Flux v1 resolved.
• ARM64 support was merged too.
• The kustomize controller health assessment was extended to custom resources that are compatible with kstatus.
• Homebrew formula for GOTK CLI, here’s how to install it.
• We added a new guide “Manage Kubernetes secrets with Mozilla SOPS” to our library. Please check it out and give us feedback.
• We are very happy we received quite a bit of user feedback, so we were able to land many fixes and improvements to GOTK.

The list goes on. We are particularly pleased with the thoughtfulness and tone of our growing community that is spec’ing out future features and integrations over in our Github Discussions section. There are many great things to come and we will showcase some of the work in our next episode.

We also created the /fluxcd/community repository. This is in response to a number of discussions which happened recently where we realised we want to better express our project-level governance and community docs - expect more discussion about this in future meetings, on Slack and elsewhere. If you would like to participate in this effort, talk to Daniel Holbach and Scott Rigby (or anyone else in the project really).

Get involved

If you like what you have read and would like to get involved, here’s how:

• Join our upcoming dev meeting on Oct 8.
• Talk to us in the #flux channel on CNCF Slack.
• Join the planning discussions.
• And if you are completely new to the GitOps Toolkit, take a look at our Get Started guide and give us feedback.

We are looking forward to working with you.

View the full article