Weave GitOps & Flux CD August Updates
Weaveworks August Product Updates. Learn what’s new in Weave GitOps Enterprise, Assured, and Flux CD.
At Weaveworks, we are committed to helping teams automate their continuous delivery pipelines and streamline their Kubernetes operations. Here are the latest enhancements and features we released to Weave GitOps solutions and FluxCD in August.
Let’s start off with enhancement for Weave GitOps Enterprise:
Monitoring & Visibility
We’ve made a few enhancements to the Explorer. Designed for cloud-native applications, the Explorer acts as a centralized hub for platform resources. Whether dealing with ten clusters or a hundred, Explorer consolidates information and provides an aggregated view of your Kubernetes clusters and various infrastructure components. More details can be found in our technical documentation.
Our latest enhancements include:
- Explorer Monitoring
- Explorer Support for Kubernetes Events
- Audit Violations Visibility
Monitoring
We've enhanced the Explorer by integrating both read and write paths to produce Prometheus metrics. This lets you delve deep into internal performance metrics, understanding operations like monitoring leaf clusters, gauging the rate of query operations, or logging data to the datastore or indexer.
Extended Support for Kubernetes Events
Expand your Explorer's capabilities by monitoring business events presented as Kubernetes Events. This opens up avenues to craft elevated user experiences. A prime example is the new "Policy Audit Violations" feature, which operates using this pattern.
Audit Violations Visibility
Leveraging the Explorer service, users can now promptly view policy agent audit violations from the past 24 hours. This enhancement sharpens your oversight capabilities and bolsters compliance monitoring.
GitOpsSets
With GitOpsSets, Platform Operators can create a single resource definition for an application for multiple environments and a fleet of clusters. It takes away the complexity of defining repetitive, individual parameters and variables by abstracting them to a single definition. Deploy fast and consistently to multiple environments.
We’ve made improvements to the Cluster Generator within GitOpsSets. Labels are now presented as universal maps, boosting their adaptability in parameter usage. Additionally, we've refined the treatment of absent artifacts during directory evaluation, enhancing error management.
External Secrets Management
Weave GitOps Secrets Management is a suite of features that streamlines secrets handling across multiple clusters in a GitOps environment. Developers can effortlessly create and track secrets like API keys and passwords via the Weave GitOps UI. Operations Teams set up secure workflows, allowing developers to manage application secrets seamlessly.
Couple this with integrations like SOPS and External Secrets Operator (ESO), and you have a robust, flexible system. The choice is yours: use a preferred secrets operator or both in tandem. Dive deeper into our Docs.
We’ve made some changes to how users can create external secrets. Now, users can select multiple properties or, if needed, encompass all properties. It's not just about adding features; it's about enhancing flexibility and control in managing sensitive information.
UI Improvements
We're continually refining the user experience, and they are not just cosmetic; they're about enhancing productivity. You'll find these improvements in Weave GitOps Enterprise and Weave GitOps Assured, as integrated from the Weave GitOps OSS version:
- Enhanced Repository Support: Our UI now offers enhanced support for Azure and Bitbucket Repositories with direct clickable links to Open Pull Requests from these providers. Now, your development process becomes even more seamless.
- Elimination of Redundancies: We've bid farewell to those pesky duplicate error messages and introduced more consistency in our headers and font sizes.
- OIDC Token Refresh: Our UI now gracefully manages OIDC token refreshes. This means no more hassles with multiple token requests that previously led to rate limiting by some OIDC providers.
- Streamlined Cluster and Template Organization: We've bolstered support for organizing clusters and templates via namespaces, making resource management through the UI a breeze.
- Dark Mode for Policy Configuration: We're thrilled to introduce Dark Mode for Policy Configuration for those who prefer a darker aesthetic.
Flux v2.0.0 APIs Integration
With the launch of Flux V2.0.0, Weave GitOps has now integrated the most recent API version. You can now manage resources, including GitRepository v1, Kustomization v1, and Receiver v1. This integration not only enhances performance but also ensures better compatibility with the updated Flux version.
Flux CD v2.1.0 Release
Flux CD is a CNCF project and continuous delivery tool. Created by Weaveworks, Flux CD powers Weaveworks GitOps solutions and products: Weave GitOps Enterprise and Weave GitOps Assured.
We’re including below the highlights of the latest v2.1.0 release. Users are encouraged to upgrade for the best experience.
- The Git capabilities have been extended with support for Git push options, refspec, HTTP/S and SOCKS5 proxies.
- Added support for OpenPGP signature verification of Git tags.
- The Flux CD alerting capabilities have been extended with Datadog support.
- Perf improvements when reconciling Helm repositories with large indexes (80% memory reduction).
- Perf improvements when reconciling Flux Kustomizations with thousands of resources (x4 faster server-side apply).
- Improved health checking with fail-fast behavior by detecting stalled Kubernetes rollouts.
- New kustomize.toolkit.fluxcd.io/ssa: IfNotPresent annotation for reconciling resources only when not present on the cluster.
- Added support for Kubernetes TLS Secret type.
- Revamp of the installation, bootstrap configuration and monitoring documentation.
- Revamp of Flux Prometheus monitoring to report metrics containing rich information about reconciliation status.
To upgrade to v2.1.0, please see the procedure published in the release notes.
If you want to experience these enhancements with guided support and expertise, ask us about Weave GitOps Assured.
Get a Free Consultation NowIf you’re looking for a GitOps platform to automate continuous delivery with security guardrails in place, you’ve come to the right place. Weaveworks solutions - Weave GitOps Enterprise and Weave GitOps Assured - empower application developers and platform operators to streamline their Kubernetes workflows.
Contact us for a free consultation today.
