flux2/rfcs/0009-custom-health-checks

RFC-0009 Custom Health Checks for Kustomization using Common Expression Language (CEL)

Status: implemented

Creation date: 2024-01-05

Last update: 2025-02-22

Summary

This RFC proposes to extend the Flux Kustomization API with custom health checks for custom resources using the Common Expression Language (CEL).

In order to provide flexibility, we propose to use CEL expressions for defining the conditions that need to be met in order to determine the health of a custom resource. We will introduce a new field called healthCheckExprs in the Kustomization CRD which will be a list of CEL expressions for evaluating the status of a particular Kubernetes resource kind.

Motivation

Flux uses the kstatus library during the health check phase to compute owned resources status. This works just fine for all the Kubernetes core resources and custom resources that comply with the kstatus conventions.

There are cases where the status of a custom resource does not follow the kstatus conventions. For example, we might want to compute the status of a custom resource based on a condition other than Ready. This is the case for resources that perform intermediary patching, like Certificate from cert-manager, where one should look at the Issuing condition to know if the certificate is being issued or not before looking at the Ready condition.

We need to provide a way for users to express the conditions that need to be met in order to determine the health of a custom resource. We seek a solution flexible enough to cover all possible use cases that does not require changing the Flux source code for each new CRD.

Goals

• Provide a generic solution for users to customise the health check evaluation of custom resources.
• Provide a space for the community to contribute custom health checks for popular custom resources.

Non-Goals

• We do not plan to support custom health checks for Kubernetes core resources.

Proposal

Introduce a new field HealthCheckExprs in the Kustomization CRD

The HealthCheckExprs field will be a list of CustomHealthCheck objects. The CustomHealthCheck object fields would be: apiVersion, kind, inProgress, failed and current.

For example, consider the following Certificate resource:

---
apiVersion: cert-manager.io/v1
kind: Certificate
metadata:
  name: app-certificate
spec:
  commonName: cert-manager-tls
  dnsNames:
  - app.ns.svc.cluster.local
  ipAddresses:
  - x.x.x.x
  isCA: true
  issuerRef:
    group: cert-manager.io
    kind: ClusterIssuer
    name: app-issuer
  secretName: app-tls-certs
  subject:
    organizations:
    - example.com

This Certificate resource will transition through the following conditions: Issuing and Ready.

In order to compute the status of this resource, we need to look at both the Issuing and Ready conditions.

The Flux Kustomization object used to apply the Certificate will look like this:

apiVersion: kustomize.toolkit.fluxcd.io/v1
kind: Kustomization
metadata:
  name: certs
spec:
  interval: 5m
  prune: true
  sourceRef:
    kind: GitRepository
    name: flux-system
  path: ./certs
  wait: true
  healthCheckExprs:
  - apiVersion: cert-manager.io/v1
    kind: Certificate
    inProgress: "status.conditions.filter(e, e.type == 'Issuing').all(e, e.observedGeneration == metadata.generation && e.status == 'True')"
    failed: "status.conditions.filter(e, e.type == 'Ready').all(e, e.observedGeneration == metadata.generation && e.status == 'False')"
    current: "status.conditions.filter(e, e.type == 'Ready').all(e, e.observedGeneration == metadata.generation && e.status == 'True')"

The .spec.healthCheckExprs field contains an entry for the Certificate kind, its apiVersion, and the CEL expressions that need to be met in order to determine the health status of all custom resources of this kind reconciled by the Flux Kustomization.

Custom Health Check Library

To help users define custom health checks, we will provide on the fluxcd.io website a library of custom health checks for popular custom resources.

The Flux community will be able to contribute to this library by submitting pull requests to the fluxcd/website repository.

User Stories

Configure health checks for non-standard custom resources

As a Flux user, I want to be able to specify health checks for custom resources that don't have a Ready condition, so that I can be notified when the status of my resources transitions to a failed state based on the evaluation of a different condition.

Using .spec.healthCheckExprs, Flux users have the ability to specify the conditions that need to be met in order to determine the health of a custom resource. This enables Flux to query any .status field, besides the standard Ready condition, and evaluate it using a CEL expression.

Example for SealedSecret which has a Synced condition:

  - apiVersion: bitnami.com/v1alpha1
    kind: SealedSecret
    failed: "status.conditions.filter(e, e.type == 'Synced').all(e, e.status == 'False')"
    current: "status.conditions.filter(e, e.type == 'Synced').all(e, e.status == 'True')"

Use Flux dependencies for Kubernetes ClusterAPI

As a Flux user, I want to be able to use Flux dependencies bases on the readiness of ClusterAPI resources, so that I can ensure that my applications are deployed only when the ClusterAPI resources are ready.

The ClusterAPI resources have a Ready condition, but this is set in the status after the cluster is first created. Given this behavior, at creation time Flux cannot find any condition to evaluate the status of the ClusterAPI resources, thus it considers them as static resources which are always ready.

Using .spec.healthCheckExprs, Flux users can specify that the Cluster kind is expected to have a Ready condition which will force Flux into waiting for the ClusterAPI resources status to be populated.

Example for Cluster:

  - apiVersion: cluster.x-k8s.io/v1beta1
    kind: Cluster
    failed: "status.conditions.filter(e, e.type == 'Ready').all(e, e.status == 'False')"
    current: "status.conditions.filter(e, e.type == 'Ready').all(e, e.status == 'True')"

Alternatives

We need an expression language that is flexible enough to cover all possible use cases, without having to change Flux source code for each new use case.

An alternative that has been considered was to use CUE instead of CEL. CUE lang is a more powerful expression language, but given the fact that Kubernetes makes use of CEL for CRD validation and admission control, we have decided to also use CEL in Flux in order to be consistent with the Kubernetes ecosystem.

Design Details

Introduce a new field HealthCheckExprs in the Kustomization CRD

The api/v1/kustomization_types.go file will be updated to add the HealthCheckExprs field to the KustomizationSpec struct.

type KustomizationSpec struct {
	// +optional
	HealthCheckExprs []CustomHealthCheck `json:"healthCheckExprs,omitempty"`
}

type CustomHealthCheck struct {
	// APIVersion of the custom resource under evaluation.
	// +required
	APIVersion string `json:"apiVersion"`
	// Kind of the custom resource under evaluation.
	// +required
	Kind string `json:"kind"`

	HealthCheckExpressions `json:",inline"`
}

type HealthCheckExpressions struct {
	// Current is the CEL expression that determines if the status
	// of the custom resource has reached the desired state.
	// +required
	Current string `json:"current"`
	// InProgress is the CEL expression that determines if the status
	// of the custom resource has not yet reached the desired state.
	// +optional
	InProgress string `json:"inProgress,omitempty"`
	// Failed is the CEL expression that determines if the status
	// of the custom resource has failed to reach the desired state.
	// +optional
	Failed string `json:"failed,omitempty"`
}

If a CEL expression evaluation results in an error, for example, looking for a field that does not exist, the health check will fail. Users will be encouraged to test their expressions in the CEL Playground. Here is where the community-maintained library will be super useful as some of the expressions might be complex.

The evaluation logic will be as follows.

First, we check if the custom resource has a .status.observedGeneration field, if it does we compare it with the .metadata.generation field to determine if the custom resource is in progress. We consider it in progress if these fields differ, and don't evaluate any of the expressions if that's the case. However, if these fields are equal there's no immediate conclusion about the health of the custom resource, so we proceed with the evaluation.

For each of the InProgress, Failed and Current expressions, we evaluate the expressions that are specified (InProgress and Failed are optional) in this specific order and return the respective status of the first expression that evaluates to true. If none of the expressions evaluate to true, we consider the custom resource in progress.

When the Failed expression is not specified the controller will keep evaluating the Current expression until it returns true, and will give up after the timeout defined in the Kustomization's spec.timeout field is reached. Users will be encouraged to provide a Failed expression to avoid stalling the reconciliation loop until the timeout is reached.

Introduce a generic custom status reader

We'll Introduce a StatusReader that will be used to compute the status of custom resources based on the CEL expressions provided in the CustomHealthCheck:

import (
	"k8s.io/apimachinery/pkg/runtime/schema"
	"github.com/fluxcd/cli-utils/pkg/kstatus/polling/engine"
	"github.com/fluxcd/cli-utils/pkg/kstatus/polling/event"
	kstatusreaders "github.com/fluxcd/cli-utils/pkg/kstatus/polling/statusreaders"

	kustomizev1 "github.com/fluxcd/kustomize-controller/api/v1"
)

type CELStatusReader struct {
	genericStatusReader engine.StatusReader
	gvk                 schema.GroupVersionKind
}

func NewCELStatusReader(mapper meta.RESTMapper, gvk schema.GroupVersionKind,
	exprs *kustomizev1.HealthCheckExpressions) engine.StatusReader {

	genericStatusReader := kstatusreaders.NewGenericStatusReader(mapper, genericConditions(gvk.Kind, exprs))
	return &CELStatusReader{
		genericStatusReader: genericStatusReader,
		gvk:                 gvk,
	}
}

func (g *CELStatusReader) Supports(gk schema.GroupKind) bool {
	return gk == g.gvk.GroupKind()
}

func (g *CELStatusReader) ReadStatus(ctx context.Context, reader engine.ClusterReader, resource object.ObjMetadata) (*event.ResourceStatus, error) {
	return g.genericStatusReader.ReadStatus(ctx, reader, resource)
}

func (g *CELStatusReader) ReadStatusForObject(ctx context.Context, reader engine.ClusterReader, resource *unstructured.Unstructured) (*event.ResourceStatus, error) {
	return g.genericStatusReader.ReadStatusForObject(ctx, reader, resource)
}

The genericConditions function takes the set of CEL expressions and returns a function that takes an Unstructured object and returns a status.Result object.

import (
	"github.com/fluxcd/cli-utils/pkg/kstatus/status"
	"github.com/fluxcd/pkg/runtime/cel"
	"k8s.io/apimachinery/pkg/apis/meta/v1/unstructured"
)

func genericConditions(exprs *kustomizev1.HealthCheckExpressions) func(u *unstructured.Unstructured) (*status.Result, error) {
	return func(u *unstructured.Unstructured) (*status.Result, error) {
		obj := u.UnstructuredContent()

		// if status.observedGeneration exists and differs from metadata.generation return status.InProgress

		for _, e := range []struct{
			expr   string
			status status.Status
		}{
			{expr: exprs.InProgress, status: status.InProgress},
			{expr: exprs.Failed, status: status.Failed},
			{expr: exprs.Current, status: status.Current},
		} {
			if e.expr != "" {
				result, err := cel.EvaluateBooleanExpr(e.expr, obj)
				if err != nil {
					return nil, err
				}
				if result {
					return &status.Result{Status: e.status}, nil
				}
			}
		}

		return &status.Result{Status: status.InProgress}, nil
	}
}

The CEL status reader will be used by the statusPoller provided to the kustomize-controller reconciler to compute the status of the resources for the registered custom resources GVKs.

We will implement a CEL environment that will use the Kubernetes CEL library to evaluate the CEL expressions.

Implementation History

• RFC implemented and generally available in Flux v2.5.