This post is part of our ongoing series of posts for Kubernetes. In this post, we will automate dependency updates for our GitOps repository using Renovate , an open-source tool that finds outdated dependencies and raises pull requests to update them.

All components in our cluster are pinned to a specific version: Helm charts in HelmRelease , Flux itself in gotk-components.yaml , and actions in our GitHub workflows. This is what GitOps expects, but nothing tells us when these versions become outdated. We hadn't touched our cluster for a while, and by the time we came back, every Helm chart had a newer release available. Checking release pages manually for each of them is error-prone and time-consuming.

Renovate addresses this challenge by scanning the repository, looking up newer versions of each dependency, and raising a pull request per update with release notes attached. We stay in control by reviewing and merging, and FluxCD takes care of rolling out the change.…