fle[ksz]ible

Flekszible is a Kubernetes configuration/manifest manager. It helps to manage your kubernetes yaml files before the deployment.

• Flekszible generates the final k8s yaml files based on source yaml file + easy to use transformation rules
• Everything can be versioned as the final files are generated and saved (GitOps)
• Transformation rules can be reused and shared (It has a powerful but extremely simple package management)
• It combines the best part of the composition based and template based approach (it's composition based but in reusable transformation rule definition you can use templates)

Features:

1. Zero-config: it can work without any external files
2. Mixins: you can define additional transformations to change k8s resources
3. Imports: You can compose resources from multiple sources (github repositories)
4. Multi-tenancy: With imports you can manage multiple environments (dev,prod,...)
5. Multi-instance: You can import the same template (eg. zookeeper resources) with different flavour. With this approach you can create two different zookeeper ring from a template to your cluster.
6. Reusable transformations: you can define transformations and reuse them later (or provide them to the user as optional flags.)
7. Package management: Simple github based package management. No separated repository format just github repositories and tags.
8. Side-car pattern friendly design: additional side-car containers can be injected
9. _build time transformation: compared to the oprerator pattern, here everything is visible as the transformations are applied on build time before using kubectl apply -f. It's more safe to switch between environments.
10. GitOps friendy: generates all the final resources to static files
11. Supports external processors like service-mesh injectors

Comparison

• Flekszible vs Helm:
  • Flekszible is based on composition instead of templates (it's more like Kustomize)
  • No server side component the final deployment will be handled by kubectl
  • But it's more flexible: you can modify any part of the source kubernetes resources
  • You don't need to add a lot of golang template conditions to customize all the parts of k8s resources
  • The package management is simpified (No other repository formats just plain git repositories. Registry is based on github tags and stars)
• Flekszible vs Kustomize:
  • It has less limitations. Flekszible is designed to be as flexible as possible with keeping the complexity on minimal.
  • It's more generic design (generic Yaml tree + transformations instead of k8s resource merging)
  • It has one generic patching style, which can be used to define high level transformations.
  • It tries to be more user friendly (easier syntax, flexible composition, it can work without registering any resource file)
  • It has a simple but powerful package management (base on git repos)
  • The transformations are reusable
  • Service-mesh friendly, any external command can be invoked.

For more information and for comparison with Helm and Kustomize: Check the docs

Install

On macOS, you can install flekszible with Homebrew package manager:

brew install elek/brew/flekszible

For linux: download the binary from the Release page

Documentation

Latest docs are available from HERE