Prepare for Flux v2.8.0

[stefanprodan]

Flux 2.8.0 adds support for Helm v4 and reduces the mean time to recovery (MTTR) for app deployments made with HelmReleases and Flux Kustomizations.

📅 Target dates: 21-26 February

🚀 Roadmap milestone: https://fluxcd.io/roadmap/#v28-q1-2026

ℹ️ Highlights

• Reduce MTTR for HelmReleases and Flux Kustomizations by canceling health checks on revision changes
• Add support for Helm v4 and server-side apply to to helm-controller (preserve Helm v3 client-side apply via feature gate)
• Extend the HelmRelease API with custom health checks for CRDs using CEL expressions
• Keep track of HelmRelease managed objects in .status.inventory
• Extends the ArtifactGenerator with support for extracting and modifying Helm charts from tarballs

⚠️ End-of-life support

The following APIs have reached end-of-life and are being removed from the CRDs:

• source.toolkit.fluxcd.io/v1beta2
• kustomize.toolkit.fluxcd.io/v1beta2
• helm.toolkit.fluxcd.io/v2beta2

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 1.26
• Kubernetes 1.35
• Controller Runtime 0.23.1
• Kustomize 5.8.1
• Helm 4.1.1
• Cosign 3.0.4

Release checklist

• source-controller v1.8.0
• source-watcher v2.1.0
• kustomize-controller v1.8.0
• notification-controller v1.8.0
• helm-controller v1.5.0
• image-reflector-controller v1.1.0
• image-automation-controller v1.1.0
• flux-benchmark v2.8.0
• flux2 v2.8.0
• terraform-provider-flux v1.8.0

Conformance testing

Distribution	Versions
Kubernetes KinD	1.33, 1.34, 1.35
OpenShift	4.20.0-okd
K3s	1.33, 1.34, 1.35
AWS	EKS 1.34
Azure	AKS 1.34
Google Cloud	GKE 1.34

Documentation

• Update API docs
• Publish v2.8 website
• Publish Flux release change log to GitHub & Slack

[Nees9895]

Target date needs to be updated
📅 Target dates: 23-36 February

[matheuscscp]

Fixed, thanks