Month: November 2020

If you have read my blog and watched my Youtube channel, you know I have worked with Flux in the past. Flux, by weaveworks, is a GitOps Kubernetes Operator that ensures that your cluster state matches the desired state described in a git repository. There are other solutions as well, such as Argo CD.

With Flux v2, GitOps on Kubernetes became a lot more powerful and easier to use. Flux v2 is built on a set of controllers and APIs called the GitOps Toolkit. The toolkit contains the following components:

• Source controller: allows you to create sources such as a GitRepository or a HelmRepository; the source controller acts on several custom resource definitions (CRDs) as defined in the docs
• Kustomize controller: runs continuous delivery pipelines defined with Kubernetes manifests (YAML) files; although you can use kustomize and define kustomization.yaml files, you do not have to; internally though, Flux v2 uses kustomize to deploy your manifests; the kustomize controller acts on Kustomization CRDs as defined here
• Helm controller: deploy your workloads based on Helm charts but do so declaratively; there is no need to run helm commands; see the docs for more information
• Notification controller: responds to incoming events (e.g. from a git repo) and sends outgoing events (e.g. to Teams or Slack); more info here

If you throw it all together, you get something like this:

Getting started

To get started, you should of course look at the documentation over at https://toolkit.fluxcd.io. I also created a series of videos about Flux v2. The first one talks about Flux v2 in general and shows how to bootstrap a cluster.

Although Flux v2 works with other source control systems than GitHub, for instance GitLab, I use GitHub in the above video. I also use kind, to make it easy to try out Flux v2 on your local machine. In subsequent videos, I use Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS).

In Flux v2, it is much easier to deploy Flux on your cluster with the flux bootstrap command. Flux v2 itself is basically installed and managed via GitOps principles by pushing all Flux v2 manifests to a git repository and running reconciliations to keep the components running as intended.

Kustomize

Flux v1 already supported kustomize but v2 takes it to another level. Whenever you want to deploy to Kubernetes with YAML manifests, you will create a kustomization, which is based on the Kustomization CRD. A kustomization is defined as below:

apiVersion: kustomize.toolkit.fluxcd.io/v1beta1
kind: Kustomization
metadata:
  name: realtimeapp-dev
  namespace: flux-system
spec:
  healthChecks:
  - kind: Deployment
    name: realtime-dev
    namespace: realtime-dev
  - kind: Deployment
    name: redis-dev
    namespace: realtime-dev
  interval: 1m0s
  path: ./deploy/overlays/dev
  prune: true
  sourceRef:
    kind: GitRepository
    name: realtimeapp-infra
  timeout: 2m0s
  validation: client

A kustomization requires a source. In this case, the source is a git repository called realtimeapp-infra that was already defined in advance. The source just points to a public git repository on Github: https://github.com/gbaeke/realtimeapp-infra.

The source contains a deploy folder, which contains a bases and an overlays folder. The kustomization points to the ./deploy/overlays/dev folder as set in path. That folder contains a kustomization.yaml file that deploys an application in a development namespace and uses the base from ./deploy/bases/realtimeapp as its source. If you are not sure what kustomize exactly does, I made a video that tries 😉 to explain it:

It is important to know that you do not need to use kustomize in your source files. If you point a Flux v2 kustomization to a path that just contains a bunch of YAML files, it will work equally well. You do not have to create a kustomization.yaml file in that folder that lists the resources (YAML files) that you want to deploy. Internally though, Flux v2 will use kustomize to deploy the manifests and uses the deployment order that kustomize uses: first namespaces, then services, then deployments, etc…

The interval in the kustomization (above set at 1 minute) means that your YAML files are applied at that interval, even if the source has not changed. This ensures that, if you modified resources on your cluster, the kustomization will reset the changes to the state as defined in the source. The source itself has its own interval. If you set a GitRepository source to 1 minute, the source is checked every 1 minute. If the source has changes, the kustomizations that depend on the source will be notified and proceed to deploy the changes.

A GitRepository source can refer to a specific branch, but can also refer to a semantic versioning tag if you use a semver range in the source. See checkout strategies for more information.

Deploying YAML manifests

If the above explanation of sources and kustomizations does not mean much to you, I created a video that illustrates these aspects more clearly:

In the above video, the source that points to https://github.com/gbaeke/realtimeapp-infra gets created first (see it at this mark). Next, I create two kustomizations, one for development and one for production. I use a kustomize base for the application plus two overlays, one for dev and one for production.

What to do when the app container images changes?

Flux v1 has a feature that tracks container images in a container registry and updates your cluster resources with a new image based on a filter you set. This requires read/write access to your git repository because Flux v1 set the images in your source files. Flux v2 does not have this feature yet (November 2020, see https://toolkit.fluxcd.io/roadmap).

In my example, I use a GitHub Action in the application source code repository to build and push the application image to Docker Hub. The GitHub action triggers a build job on two events:

• push to main branch: build a container image with a short sha as the tag (e.g. gbaeke/flux-rt:sha-94561cb
• published release: build a container image with the release version as the tag (e.g. gbaeke/flux-rt:1.0.1)

When the build is caused by a push to main, the update-dev-image job runs. It modifies kustomization.yaml in the dev overlay with kustomize edit:

update-dev-image:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    if: contains(github.ref, 'heads')
    needs:
    - build
    steps:
    - uses: imranismail/setup-kustomize@v1
      with:
        kustomize-version: 3.8.6
    - run: git clone https://${REPO_TOKEN}@github.com/gbaeke/realtimeapp-infra.git .
      env:
        REPO_TOKEN: ${{secrets.REPO_TOKEN}}
    - run: kustomize edit set image gbaeke/flux-rt:sha-$(git rev-parse --short $GITHUB_SHA)
      working-directory: ./deploy/overlays/dev
    - run: git add .
    - run: |
        git config user.email "$EMAIL"
        git config user.name "$GITHUB_ACTOR"
      env:
        EMAIL: ${{secrets.EMAIL}}
    - run: git commit -m "Set dev image tag to short sha"
    - run: git push

Similarly, when the build is caused by a release, the image is updated in the production overlay’s kustomization.yaml file.

Conclusion

If you are interested in GitOps as an alternative for continuous delivery to Kubernetes, do check out Flux v2 and see if it meets your needs. I personally like it a lot and believe that they are setting the standard for GitOps on Kubernetes. I have not covered Helm deployments, monitoring and alerting features yet. I will create additional videos and posts about those features in the near future. Stay tuned!