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How Weave Flux Works |
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This page describes the goals of flux, how it achieves them and significant architectural decisions. It is intentionally high level to prevent it from being out of date too quickly.
The overall goal of Flux is to automate the deployment of services. A typical use case would be:
- A developer makes changes
- An operational cluster is now out of date and needs to be updated
- Flux observes those changes and deploys them to the cluster
- Flux maintains the current state of the cluster (e.g. in the event of failure)
Hence, the goal is to automate away the need for a developer to interact with an orchestrator (which is a common source of accidental failure) or with the systems that ensure that the orchestrator is in a working state.
Flux also provides a CLI and a UI (in Weave Cloud) to perform these operations manually. Flux is flexible enough to fit into any development process.
The following describes how Flux achieves the goals.
The Flux team firmly believe that cluster state should be version controlled. This allows users to record the history of the cluster, fallback to previous versions and recreate clusters in exactly the same state when required.
But there is also another aspect. By tightly integrating the cluster with version control, the cluster becomes more tightly integrated with the deployment pipeline. This means that developers no longer have to interact directly with a cluster (with the inevitable consequences of a "fat-finger" mistake) which makes it far more stable and ideally immutable.
Flux achieves this by automatically synchronising the state of the cluster to match the code representing the cluster in the repository.
This simple idea then allows for a whole range of tools that can react to changes and simply write to a repository.
Flux reads a list of running containers from the user git repository. For each image, it will query the container registry to obtain the most recently released tag.
Flux then compares the most recent image tag with that specified in the git repository. If they don't match, the repository is updated.
When services are in an "automated" mode, the service will periodically check to see whether there are any new images. If there are, then they are written to the repository.
When automation is disabled, images are not checked.
In order to access private registries, credentials may be required.
Flux will only deploy different images. It will not re-deploy images with the same tag.
Once a list of new images have been established, it will alter the configuration of the cluster to deploy the new images.
Images can be "locked" to a specific version. "locked" images won't be updated by automated or manual means.
Flux integrates with Slack. A Slack API endpoint is required.
Flux will announce to slack when changes have occured.
Flux also exposes the history of its actions for auditing purposes. You can see every event that has happened on the cluster.
Get started by installing Flux.