v6.18.0

Released: June 27, 2025

6.18.0 (2025-06-27)

🚨 Upgrade Notices

• Big Bang 3.0.0 requires migration to operatorless Istio.
  • Starting with this release, the deprecated istio and istioOperator components cannot be successfully enabled.
  • Ensure that you have migrated all configurations to the istiod and istioGateway components as appropriate, and that you have removed the istio and istioOperator top-level keys from your bigbang-values.yaml and bigbang-secrets.yaml, if applicable.
  • Review the Operatorless Istio Migration Guide for more details.

📦 SmoothGlue Features

• This release adds a new instance_storage_mounts input variable to the eks-cluster IaC module to allow any instance storage present on the instance to be automatically formatted and mounted for use.
  • If the instance type has no instance storage available, this input has no effect. See the EKS Config Reference page for information on configuring this variable.
• The bbctl Big Bang compliance dashboard tool has been added as a SmoothGlue platform tool. It is disabled by default.
  • When enabled, the bbctl tool runs periodically and collects certain information regarding cluster configuration and Kyverno policy violations. This data is presented via Grafana dashboards.
  • See the upstream chart for more details.

⏩ Upgraded Packages

• SmoothGlue Enterprise v6.18.0 includes Big Bang Version 3.0.0. For more details on the features and updates included in Big Bang 3.0.0, please refer to the Big Bang release notes.
  • See the upgrade notice above regarding the required migration to operatorless Istio.
  • Configuration for Jaeger and Cluster Auditor has been removed from top-level Big Bang umbrella chart, so matching references in the default bigbang-values.yaml have also been removed.
  • Flux CD has been updated to v2.6.1.
• Crossplane has been updated to v1.20.0. Refer to the Crossplane v1.20.0 Release Notes for full details. Notable changes:
  • Realtime reconciliation is now enabled by default and enables Crossplane to actively watch for changes, potentially speeding up resource reconciliation significantly. The --poll-interval flag no longer has an effect.
  • The default registry for Crossplane packages is now xpkg.crossplane.io (instead of xpkg.upbound.io). This has no direct effect on SmoothGlue users since SmoothGlue uses hardened containers from registry1.dso.mil.
• The crossplane-provider-gitlab image has been updated to v0.10.5.
  • This version of crossplane-provider-gitlab allows use of HTTP basic authentication interacting with GitLab. This has implications for the bootstrapping process for GitLab, when no Personal Access Tokens have yet been created.
    • To configure crossplane-provider-gitlab to use HTTP basic authentication:
      • Add the following to the provider-gitlab ProviderConfig:

        kind: ProviderConfig
        spec:
          credentials:
            method: BasicAuth
            secretRef:
              key: credential
              name: your-secret-name
              namespace: crossplane-system

      • Create the your-secret-name secret in the crossplane-system namespace:

        kind: Secret
        data:
          credential: <base64-encoded credential>

      • The credential can be generated using a shell command:

        echo -n '{"username": "your-username", "password": "your-password"}' | base64

    • See the crossplane-provider-gitlab GitHub for more details.

🪲 Bug Fixes

• SmoothGlue platform tools that were previously enabled can now be disabled by explicitly setting the relevant Zarf _ENABLED flag to false. (For example, to disable Keycloak, set the KEYCLOAK_ENABLED flag to false.) A Helm keep annotation prevents the platform tools from being disabled inadvertently, but setting the _ENABLED flag now removes this annotation and allows the component to be disabled. This change has no effect if the _ENABLED flag is left blank or is otherwise not set explicitly to false.
• When using the automatic SSO configuration with custom realms, this release fixes an issue with automatic detection of the custom realm(s).
• This release fixes an issue where Istio components could not be disabled independently of the MIGRATE_ISTIO flag. This allows the new and deprecated Istio components to be toggled individually.

🌐 Compatibility

• The packages for this release were built using Zarf v0.55.6.
• The packages were tested across the following Kubernetes distributions:
  • RKE2: v1.31.8+rke2r1
  • K3s: v1.32.5+k3s1
  • EKS: v1.31.7
• The following AMI versions were used for testing:
  • EKS AMI: smoothglue-eks-1.31.7-rocky-8-base-v1.1.1-stig-2025-05-19T08-22-32Z
  • RKE2 AMI: smoothglue-rke2-v1.31.8-rke2r1-rocky-8-base-v1.1.1-stig-2025-05-19T08-22-30Z
  • Base AMI: base-Rocky-8-EC2-LVM-v1.1.1-stig-2025-05-19T0702

🔗 Helpful Links

• Refer to the SmoothGlue documentation for additional guidance.
• For details on the Big Bang release, see the Big Bang Release Notes.