Flux v2 is getting closer

weaveworks · February 25, 2021

The TL;DR of this post is:

The Flux → Flux v2 migration period is coming soon.
Don’t delay familiarizing yourself with Flux v2 and please help us test the Migration Guides!

Before we get started, how does Flux deliver GitOps?

If you are new to the community and GitOps, check out how GitOps is defined and the original GitOps FAQ.

Flux as a project was initially developed in mid-2016 to help with our deployments at Weaveworks, but we quickly realized its potential and how it fit with industry trends that our CEO, Alexis Richardson, eventually coined the term “GitOps.” We integrated Flux into our Weave Cloud product, added Helm support in 2018, and quickly grew its feature list.

As the Flux user community grew, with more enterprises using it in production, we knew in April last year that it was time to rewrite Flux from scratch, rebuild it on top of modern tooling, and make it the most powerful GitOps tool in the cloud-native ecosystem. As a result, we were able to implement many long-standing feature requests from the community: namely multiple sources, dropping root privileges, supporting multi-tenancy and more. We know that change can be challenging to the many people who have relied on Flux as an essential tool, but we are so grateful to the enthusiasm of the users who have been trying out Flux 2. We also appreciate the growing number of core maintainers who have been essential to getting us to feature parity and very close to our first GA release.

Your next steps to GitOps with Flux v2!

The Flux community blog, which launched last year, points to key updates and guides to address your critical needs. (If you need more detail, check the individual posts of December, January and February).

What are GitOps core concepts?

We’ve added core concepts to get you started in the Flux world and we’ll continue to build them out.

How to migrate from Helm Operator (Flux v1) to Helm Controller (and Flux v2)?

The Helm Operator offered support for both Helm v2 and v3, due to Kubernetes client incompatibility issues between the versions. This has blocked the Helm Operator from being able to upgrade to a newer v3 version since the release of 3.2.0. This guide covers everything you need to know for migrating from the Helm Operator to the Helm Controller.

How to automate image updates to Git?

After tireless work to get this to feature parity, we are excited to share the guide on how to use automated image updates! Please try them out and give us feedback!

How to manage multi-tenant clusters with GitOps?

Flux v2 now has multi-tenancy support (as Flux v1 did), which can help to maximize resources and minimize costs when developing applications on Kubernetes. Get started with this repo to manage multi-tenant clusters with Git and Flux v2: read the guide.

How to use Flux 2 with Azure DevOps?

You can install Flux and bootstrap repositories hosted on Azure DevOps and any other Git provider that supports SSH or token-based authentication (eg. GitLab, BitBucket, etc.). A core part of GitOps is the ability to automate image updates to Git using Flux. In addition to bringing the image update functionality in line with feature parity, we’ve added Azure DevOps support and we’ll be updating more docs for Azure-Flux v2 users. Follow these steps to configure container image scanning and deployment rollouts with Flux for ACR.

How to suspend/resume Helm charts and Buckets?

Being able to suspend/resume Helm charts and Buckets can be critical. This allows you to freeze the cluster reconciliation to the last fetched revision during an incident or on “No Release Fridays”. Now you can do this via Flux CLI or Git! Find out more in our docs.

How to keep two clusters updated with minimal duplication?

Read our new guide on how to leverage Flux v2, Helm, and Kustomize to manage both clusters while minimizing duplicated declarations.

Thanks!

As a project, Flux has grown quite a bit as well: Aurel Canciu, who works at Sortlist, joined the maintainers team. Kingdon Barrett, joined as OSS Support Engineer at Weaveworks and will help us support Flux v1 in its maintenance mode. We created the Flux community team, we incorporated Flagger into the Flux project and applied for Incubation status within the CNCF.

Our team delivered many talks, so check out the list for some great demos.

We appreciate the community’s enthusiasm and support. We’ve updated the fluxcd.io website to keep you informed through the new blog, Flux Community page, and Flux Support page. Here you’ll find important resources, including information for upcoming and past Flux v2 demos and walk-throughs.

Start taking a look at Flux v2 now

Now is a good time to test out Flux v2, give us feedback for https://toolkit.fluxcd.io/get-started/, and stay ahead of the curve before we begin the official 6-month migration process toward Flux v1 deprecation. Thanks to the community and maintainers, we are getting toward the end of our to-do list for Flux v2 to be on-par with v1. Please try out the guides and help us as we start the period of extensive testing and polishing before we are ready to announce GA.

Weavework is all about GitOps

If your company is new to GitOps or needs help scaling, reach out to us at Weaveworks.

Not only did we start the Flux project, coined the term “GitOps” and defined the initial GitOps principles, but we also worked with many organizations and together implemented best practices.

Check out some of our case studies:

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