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First Customer-managed Deployment

Use this path when building a persistent GitOps environment. For disposable evaluation, use the Evaluation Quickstart instead.

The Big Bang customer template is the maintained starting point for the environment repository. Its release-specific instructions are authoritative for the template’s directory layout and bootstrap commands; this page describes the decisions that must be made before using it.

1. Select and Validate a Release

  • Choose an immutable Big Bang release tag.
  • Confirm that the target cluster satisfies that release’s kubeVersion constraint.
  • Review the Big Bang release notes and the enabled packages’ upgrade or installation notes.
  • Complete the prerequisites for capacity, networking, storage, ingress, credentials, and Flux.

2. Create the Environment Repository

Copy or fork the customer template into a repository controlled by your organization. Protect the default branch, require review, restrict Flux credentials to the required repositories, and define ownership for promotion and rollback.

Keep environment-specific configuration in this repository. Do not edit the Big Bang release source to hold customer values.

3. Configure Desired State

At minimum, define:

  • The pinned Big Bang release and package source versions.
  • The base domain, gateways, certificates, and DNS plan.
  • Registry and repository credentials.
  • The enabled package set and its capacity and persistence requirements.
  • SOPS encryption and Flux decryption-key access.
  • Cluster-specific CNI, CSI, load-balancer, identity, and policy settings.

Use the configuration guide and the selected release’s generated configuration reference. Keep secrets encrypted in Git.

4. Bootstrap and Reconcile

Follow the customer template’s bootstrap procedure to install the pinned Flux manifests and apply the top-level environment resources. Then follow reconciliation from the environment source to the Big Bang release and package releases:

flux check
flux get sources all -A
flux get kustomizations -A
flux get helmreleases -A

Do not treat a successful Helm action as complete validation.

5. Validate the Environment

Verify at least:

  • All Flux sources, Kustomizations, and HelmReleases are ready.
  • Workloads are healthy and remain schedulable during planned disruption.
  • Storage, backup, and restore behavior meet the data requirements.
  • Ingress, DNS, certificates, SSO, and authorization work as designed.
  • Network and admission policies enforce the intended boundaries.
  • Metrics, logs, alerts, and operational ownership are in place.
  • Application-level smoke tests pass.

Before production promotion, establish the operations and upgrade procedures for this environment.