Highlights for the week ending November 12, 2021

Apps

Flux v0.7.0 provides the Flux Toolkit version 0.21.0 and adds service discovery labels for Prometheus, so that metrics are scraped.

User interfaces

In the web UI, we now display if a cluster has upgrades scheduled.

kubectl gs login has been improved in several ways. Most importantly, the command now also supports using a service account token for authentication via the --token flag. This facilitates creation of workload cluster client certificates especially in automation. (Docs)

Additionally, when creating a client certificate for a workload cluster, the flag --organization is now optional as long as the workload cluster name is unique.

kubectl gs will also notify you when using an outdated plugin version. When that happens, the new kubectl gs selfupdate command allows to update the plugin to the latest version, for those not using Krew.

Management API

For kubectl get apps.application.giantswarm.io (or just kubectl get apps) we changed the output columns for the App CRD. With that, for apps installed in workload clusters, you can now differentiate the installed version from the desired version.

In automation, please make sure to use JSON or YAML output of kubectl get commands instead if plain text, so your implementation is not affected by a change like the above.

Monitoring

If you are using Flux CD in the management cluster for your own good, you’ll want to check out the two new Grafana dashboards on Flux CD metrics which we added this week. Flux Cluster Stats showcases reconcilers and operator data, while Flux Control Plane will give you an insight into resource usage, number of API requests, and ongoing operation rates.