GitOps

Flux watches my kubernetes folder (see Directory structure) and makes the changes to my cluster based on the YAML manifests.

The way Flux works for me here is it will recursively search the kubernetes/apps folder until it finds the most top level kustomization.yaml per directory and then apply all the resources listed in it. That aforementioned kustomization.yaml will generally only have a namespace resource and one or many Flux kustomizations. Those Flux kustomizations will generally have a HelmRelease or other resources related to the application underneath it which will be applied.

Renovate watches my entire repository looking for dependency updates, when they are found a PR is automatically created. When PRs are merged Flux applies the changes to my cluster.

Directory structure

My home-ops repository contains the following directories under kubernetes.

📁 kubernetes      # Kubernetes clusters defined as code
├─📁 main     # My main kubernetes cluster
│ ├─📁 bootstrap   # Flux installation
│ ├─📁 flux        # Main Flux configuration of repository
│ └─📁 apps        # Apps deployed into my cluster grouped by namespace (see below)
└─📁 tools         # Manifests that come in handy every now and then

Flux resource layout

Below is a a high level look at the layout of how my directory structure with Flux works. In this brief example you are able to see that authelia will not be able to run until glauth and cloudnative-pg are running. It also shows that the Cluster custom resource depends on the cloudnative-pg Helm chart. This is needed because cloudnative-pg installs the Cluster custom resource definition in the Helm chart.

# Key: <kind> :: <metadata.name>
GitRepository :: home-ops-kubernetes
    Kustomization :: cluster
        Kustomization :: cluster-apps
            Kustomization :: cluster-apps-authelia
                DependsOn:
                    Kustomization :: cluster-apps-glauth
                    Kustomization :: cluster-apps-cloudnative-pg-cluster
                HelmRelease :: authelia
            Kustomization :: cluster-apps-glauth
                HelmRelease :: glauth
            Kustomization :: cluster-apps-cloudnative-pg
                HelmRelease :: cloudnative-pg
            Kustomization :: cluster-apps-cloudnative-pg-cluster
                DependsOn:
                    Kustomization :: cluster-apps-cloudnative-pg
                Cluster :: postgres