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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.