Weave GitOps & Flux CD November Product Updates
The November product update introduces additional operational efficiencies such as connecting leaf clusters via CLI, enhancements for GitOps Sets, smoother installation, and monitoring enhancements.
The latest product enhancements for Weave GitOps Enterprise and Assured focus on streamlining operations - especially in the areas of cluster connectivity, resource management, and user interface. Significant strides have been made in simplifying cluster operations with GitOpsSets, enhancing the installation process, and expanding monitoring capabilities. Dive into the specifics of how these advancements deliver a more efficient and user-friendly experience for platform engineers and development teams.
New in Weave GitOps Enterprise
Weave GitOps Enterprise is a full-stack GitOps platform that enables continuous application delivery and automates Kubernetes management. It’s powered by Flux CD, the popular CNCF open-source tool, and based on the GItOps principles. Some of the newly released features include:
Fast and easy: Connect leaf clusters via CLI
To cut down time and steps for connecting leaf clusters, we developed gitops connect cluster CLI. Teams can now streamline the connect cluster experience in a single command that creates a ServiceAccount and a Secret in the remote cluster, allowing access to the management cluster.
Enhancements to GitOpsSets
GitOpsSets enable Platform Operators to have a single resource definition for an application for multiple environments and a fleet of clusters. This feature simplifies the complex process of defining repetitive, individual parameters and variables by abstracting them into a single definition. Configure and deploy to multiple environments with ease.
This latest iteration had several enhancements to GitOpsSets:
- Increased default memory for the controller-deployment to 1Gi and added documentation on how to increase it.
- Added a new function to the templating mechanism for embedding YAML from generated elements.
- Fixed an issue with partial-applies that caused inventory to be lost, which could lead to the removal of resources.
For more information, check out our technical documentation.
Installation Improvements: Bootstrap CLI (Phase 1)
The newly released gitops-ee bootstrap CLI makes installing Weave GitOps Enterprise on the management cluster a breeze. New users can utilize a wizard-like experience, guiding the users until they access Weave GitOps Enterprise dashboards. This is the first phase of major improvements and contains:
- Verifying entitlement and Flux installation
- Configuring admin login
- Setting up external DNS to host our dashboards.
Head to the documentation for more information.
Enhancements to Explorer UI
With Explorer, platform engineers can discover, manage, and operate platform resources from a single place across all Kubernetes clusters.
In this latest release, we’ve added support for GitOpsSets in the default UI and fixed the render of OCIRepositoryas as a regular source. In addition, a new Generic Explorer UI that can be configured to create tailored experiences for specific resources is now available.
Learn more about Explorer’s monitoring capabilities in the technical documentation.
Extended Operations Capabilities with Profiling, Dashboards, and Easier Setup
Platform Engineers operating Weave GitOps Enterprise expect to have telemetry and tooling at their fingertips to uncover issues immediately.
In this release, we have extended the operations capabilities by:
- Adding Profiling to help users have a fine-grain understanding of runtime to catch any performance issues.
- Extended monitoring with new general dashboards and streamlined setup process.
Users can now monitor the following Weave GitOps components:
- Overview: monitors Weave GitOps golden signals for API servers and controller
- Runtime: monitors Go runtime metrics like memory usage, memory heap, and Goroutines
- Explorer: exports API server, Datastore Reads, and Indexer Reads metrics.
Head to Weave GitOps Enterprise Monitoring to learn more.
Figure: Weave GitOps Overview Metrics
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Learn MoreNew OSS features in Flux CD
The following new Flux CD releases are also available to Weave GitOps Assured and Enterprise users today. Let’s take a look.
Flux Backstage Plugin
In September, we released the Flux CD Backstage Plugin to empower teams to manage GitOps workflows directly from the popular developer portal. Users gain comprehensive visibility into all Flux CD resources seamlessly managed across their Kubernetes clusters. This integration fosters a unified and efficient development experience. Learn more about the new plugin, how it works, and how to get started here.
Since then, we’ve released new functionality, allowing application developers to view the latest policy-image for an image repository. Secondly, we added support for Suspending and Resuming Flux-based resources in the Backstage UI. Check out our technical documentation here.
Watch the Flux CD Plugin for the Backstage demo video:
TF Controller and Weave GitOps OSS earn OpenSSF Best Practices Badges
Many OSS projects, including Flagger and Flux, follow the Open Source Security Foundation's (OpenSSF) best practices to gain and retain user trust as part of their project governance activities. The OpenSSF standards cover documentation, licensing, change control, reporting issues and vulnerabilities, quality, security, and code analysis.
We are proud to have earned the “passing” badge for TF-Controller, a Flux CD controller to reconcile Terraform resources the GitOps way. And Weave GitOps OSS is already 87% on the way toward claiming the “passing” badge as well.
Terraform Controller Updates
We’ve made changes to how users can access Terraform resources logs. Users can now use the tfctl logs to navigate the logs natively in the tfct CLI experience. This functionality is similar to what Flux users get using ‘flux logs’. It addresses CLI users' inability to navigate Terraform resources and accompanying logs through the tfctl CLI.
Contact us today for a demo or more information on adopting Flux CD, Weave GitOps Assured or Enterprise.
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