Flux Kluctl Controller (deprecated)

⚠️The flux-kluctl-controller is deprecated⚠️

Please migrate to the new Kluctl Controller

The migration guide can be found here

The Flux Kluctl Controller is a Kubernetes operator, specialized in running continuous delivery pipelines for infrastructure defined with kluctl .

Motivation

⚠️The flux-kluctl-controller is deprecated⚠️

kluctl is a tool that allows you to declare and manage small, large, simple and/or complex multi-env and multi-cluster deployments. It is designed in a way that allows seamless co-existence of CLI centered DevOps and automation, for example in the form of GitOps/flux.

This means that you can continue doing local development of your deployments and test them from your local machine, for example by regularly running kluctl diff . When you believe you’re done with your work, you can then commit your changes to Git and let the Flux Kluctl Controller do the actual deployment.

You could also have a dedicated target that you solely use for local development and deployment testing and then let the Flux Kluctl Controller handle the deployments to the real (e.g. pre-prod or prod) targets.

This way you can have both:

1. Easy and reliable development and testing of your deployments (no more change+commit+push+wait+error+retry cycles).
2. Consistent GitOps style automation.

The Flux Kluctl Controller supports all types of Kluctl projects, including simple ones where a single Git repository contains all necessary data and complex ones where for example clusters or target configurations are in other Git repositories.

Installation

⚠️The flux-kluctl-controller is deprecated⚠️

Installation instructions can be found here

Design

⚠️The flux-kluctl-controller is deprecated⚠️

The reconciliation process can be defined with a Kubernetes custom resource that describes a pipeline such as:

• fetch root kluctl project from source-controller (Git repository or S3 bucket)
• deploy the specified target via kluctl deploy
• prune orphaned objects via kluctl prune
• validate the deployment status via kluctl validate
• alert if something went wrong
• notify if the cluster state changed

A pipeline runs on-a-schedule and ca be triggered manually by a cluster admin or automatically by a source event such as a Git revision change.

When a pipeline is removed from the cluster, the controller’s GC terminates all the objects previously created by that pipeline.

A pipeline can be suspended, while in suspension the controller stops the scheduler and ignores any source events. Deleting a suspended pipeline does not trigger garbage collection.

Alerting can be configured with a Kubernetes custom resource that specifies a webhook address, and a group of pipelines to be monitored.

The API design of the controller can be found at kluctldeployment.flux.kluctl.io/v1beta1 .

Example

⚠️The flux-kluctl-controller is deprecated⚠️

After installing flux-kluctl-controller, we can create a Kluctl deployment that automatically deploys the Microservices Demo .

Create a KluctlDeployment that uses the demo project source to deploy the test target to the same cluster that the controller runs on.

apiVersion: flux.kluctl.io/v1alpha1
kind: KluctlDeployment
metadata:
  name: microservices-demo-test
  namespace: flux-system
spec:
  interval: 10m
  source:
    url: https://github.com/kluctl/kluctl-examples.git
    path: "./microservices-demo/3-templating-and-multi-env/"
  timeout: 2m
  target: test
  context: default
  prune: true

This example will deploy a fully-fledged microservices application with multiple backend services, frontends and databases, all via one single KluctlDeployment.

To deploy the same Kluctl project to another target (e.g. prod), simply create the following resource.

apiVersion: flux.kluctl.io/v1alpha1
kind: KluctlDeployment
metadata:
  name: microservices-demo-prod
  namespace: flux-system
spec:
  interval: 10m
  source:
    url: https://github.com/kluctl/kluctl-examples.git
    path: "./microservices-demo/3-templating-and-multi-env/"
  timeout: 2m
  target: prod
  context: default
  prune: true