Prepare for Flux v2.7.0

[stefanprodan]

Flux 2.7.0 promotes the Image Automation APIs to v1 (GA) and comes with new features, bug fixes and performance improvements.

Flux 2.7.0 comes with a new set of APIs (ExternalArtifact & ArtifactGenerator) and a new controller source-watcher that extends Flux with advanced source composition and decomposition patterns.

📅 Target dates: 29-30 September

🚀 Roadmap milestone: https://fluxcd.io/roadmap/#v27-q3-2025

ℹ️ Highlights

• General availability release for the Flux Image Automation APIs (ImagePolicy, ImageRepository, ImageUpdateAutomation)
• Support for 3rd-party source controllers (ExternalArtifact)
• Support for source composition and decomposition patterns (ArtifactGenerator)
• Watch for changes in ConfigMaps and Secrets references (Kustomization, HelmRelease)
• Extend the readiness evaluation of dependencies with CEL expressions (Kustomization, HelmRelease)
• Introduce RetryOnFailure lifecycle management strategy (HelmRelease)
• Support mTLS for sending alerts to external systems (Provider)
• Support mTLS for GitHub App transport (GitRepository, ImageUpdateAutomation, Provider)
• OpenTelemetry tracing for Kustomization and HelmRelease reconciliation (Provider)
• Support for remote cluster authentication using Workload Identity (Kustomization, HelmRelease)
• Support object-level workload identity auth for AKS, EKS, GKE, Azure DevOps, Azure Event Hubs, Azure Blob Storage, GCP Pub/Sub, GCP Storage, AWS S3

⚠️ End-of-life support

All the Flux APIs v1beta1 and v2beta1 have reached end-of-life and are being removed from the CRDs.

Unless you are using Flux Operator to deploy the Flux controllers, you must run the flux migrate command on clusters before upgrading.

Dependencies updates

• Go 1.25
• Kubernetes 1.34
• Controller Runtime 0.22.1
• Kustomize 5.7.1
• Helm 3.19.0

Release checklist

• source-controller v1.7.0
• source-watcher v2.0.1
• kustomize-controller v1.7.0
• notification-controller v1.7.1
• helm-controller v1.4.0
• image-reflector-controller v1.0.1
• image-automation-controller v1.0.1
• flux-benchmark v2.7.0
• flux2 v2.7.0
• terraform-provider-flux v1.7.0

Conformance testing

Distribution	Versions
Kubernetes KinD	1.32, 1.33, 1.34
OpenShift	4.19.0-okd
K3s	1.32, 1.33, 1.34
AWS	EKS 1.33
Azure	AKS 1.33
Google Cloud	GKE 1.33

Documentation

• Update API docs
• Add source-watcher to GitOps Toolkit docs
• Publish Flux release change log to GitHub & Slack
• Publish v2.7 website