Progressive Delivery on AKS: A Step-by-Step Guide using Flagger with Istio and FluxCD

In my previous post, we setup an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster to automatically update images based on new image tags in a container registry. As soon as a new image was pushed to the registry the image was immediately updated.

But what if you don’t want an agent automatically pushing out new images without some sort of testing? 🤔

In this article, we’ll build upon Flux’s image update automation capability and add Flagger to implement a canary release strategy.

Automating Image Updates with FluxCD on AKS

In my previous post, we walked through the setup of FluxCD on AKS via AKS extensions. In this article, we’ll go a bit deeper and take a look at how you can use FluxCD to automate image updates in your AKS cluster.

The goal here is to streamline the process of updating your application deployments in your cluster.

Here is our intended workflow:

1. Modify application code, then commit and push the change to the repo.
2. Create a new release in GitHub which kicks off a release workflow to build and push an updated container image to a GitHub Container Registry.
3. FluxCD detects the new image and updates the image tag in the cluster.
4. FluxCD rolls out the new image to the cluster.

We’ll use same AKS store demo app we used in the previous post, but this time we’ll go a bit faster.

Git going with GitOps on AKS: A Step-by-Step Guide using FluxCD AKS Extension

In reading through @StevenMurawski’s blog post titled, What Really is GitOps? we learned that GitOps is a way to do Continuous Delivery of our applications on Kubernetes.

In this post, I will jump right into how you can “git” going with GitOps by enabling the FluxCD AKS Extension on your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and using a tool called Kustomize to help with Kubernetes configuration management.

We’ll deploy my new favorite demo app, AKS Store Demo to our AKS cluster and then make some changes to the application and see how FluxCD handles them.