Plural Observers in Continuous Deployment

Detect upstream changes and automatically trigger deployments, enabling fast, event-driven continuous delivery.

Plural’s Observer framework implements the Observer Pattern, automatically watching external sources and triggering deployments based on detected changes. This eliminates the need for manual intervention when new versions of applications or dependencies are released.

Overview of Plural Observers

Plural’s Observer CRD (Observer resource) defines:

What to watch: External targets like Git repositories, Helm registries, OCI registries, or Plural add-ons.
How often to poll: Using a crontab schedule.
What actions to perform: Launch a pipeline or open a pull request when changes are discovered.

This event-driven model integrates tightly with GitOps practices, ensuring deployments stay in sync with upstream artifacts dynamically and safely.

Available Observer Target Types

There are a variety of observer scrape targets that an action can act upon are:

HELM - scrape a helm chart and act on new versions
GIT - scrape a git repo in plural and act on new tags
ADDON - scrape a Plural addon-compatibility table and act on new versions compatible with a list of kubernetes versions
EKS_ADDON - scape a Plural eks addon compatibility table and act on new versions compatible with a list of kubernetes versions

Info:

The last two are often the most useful, and can automate almost all the addon version maintenance related to kubernetes upgrades.