[🔴] ACTION REQUIRED: Change of default simplestreams server #180
Description
Summary
Dear users,
The default simplestreams server used by cluster-api-provider-incus is migrating to a new place. This means existing CAPN deployments must be updated to v0.8.3 or newer, to use the new simplestreams server.
What Do You Need To Do?
IF YOU ARE:
- using cluster-api-provider-incus version
v0.8.2or earlier. - relying on the default kubeadm images.
YOU MUST DO ONE OF THE FOLLOWING:
- Upgrade to cluster-api-provider-incus
v0.8.3or newer (in progress). - Manually update your cluster manifests to use a custom image, or the new image server (see below).
What Is Going To Happen?
Starting from 2025-12-19, the cluster-api-provider-incus project will switch to the following two simplestreams servers:
- https://images.linuxcontainers.org/capn/ (default)
- https://images-stg.capn.open-cloud.xyz/capn/staging (used for testing purposes)
Starting from 2025-12-31, the old simplestreams servers will be shut down.
Why Is This Happening?
Infrastructure costs for the CloudFront distributions that server our project image servers are kindly subsidized by the National Technical University Of Athens.
So far, these were:
- https://d14dnvi2l3tc5t.cloudfront.net (default)
- https://djapqxqu5n2qu.cloudfront.net (staging)
Unfortunately, the owner project has not been renewed, and is shutting down unexpectedly and with very little notice, effective immediately. It is not clear when the distributions will be terminated, but starting from 2025-12-19 they are expected to start becoming unavailable. Image pulls will fail.
This has left the project with very limited options about how to proceed.
Will Existing Clusters Be Affected?
NO, EXISTING CLUSTERS WILL NOT BE AFFECTED.
Since the image is already pulled, any instances will keep running without issues, using the local copy of the image.
However, it will likely be impossible to spin up new instances with these images, as the image reference will not be available.
What Steps Is The Project Taking?
- We will switch the images server to https://images.linuxcontainers.org/capn.
- All images are built in GitHub Actions, and synced into the simplestreams server, as described in https://github.com/lxc/cluster-api-provider-incus/blob/main/hack/infra/images.yaml
Apologies
While all this is in line with the project's disclaimer and support policy with the image server, we want to say that we are deeply sorry for the inconvience this is expect to cause. We are users of open source projects as well, but issues like this are not always preventable.
That said, we want to share that we are trying to address the arising situation as gracefully as possible, always within the confines of our limited resources.
With that, we want to echo the recommendation from our documentation page:
It is recommended that production environments build their own custom images instead.
Questions
For any questions, recommendations or help, please comment on this issue.