v1.17.0

🚀 New Features

ClusterHealthCheck: Notification Policy
A ClusterHealthCheck notification can now carry an optional policy that reduces the number of messages sent while a cluster is changing. onlyOnTransition notifies only when a cluster moves between passing and failing, not when the failure message changes while it keeps failing. minInterval sets the minimum time between two notifications for the same cluster, and changes inside the interval are coalesced. failingFor sets how long a cluster must keep failing before the failure is notified, so a failure that ends sooner is never sent, nor is its recovery. What was last delivered is recorded in the NotificationSummary, so the decisions survive a restart. Notifications without a policy behave as before. The failure message now lists resources in a stable order, so the same failures no longer look like a change.
PRs: libsveltos #699, healthcheck-manager #443, sveltos #808

Report Drifted Resources
The ClusterSummary now says which resources drifted. Each feature has a lastDrift with the detection time and the drifted resources (group, kind, namespace, name and, for Helm, the release). It is kept after the drift is corrected and replaced by the next one, and lists at most 20 resources with a truncated flag when more drifted. It is only set for profiles with syncMode ContinuousWithDriftDetection. The dashboard shows the drift history of each profile on a cluster, and sveltosctl has a new command, show drift-history, that lists the drifted resources and when they drifted, filtered by cluster, profile or feature. In pull mode a Helm chart is now re-applied only when it changed or drifted, as in push mode. Before, a change or a drift on one chart re-applied every chart of the profile.
PRs: libsveltos #701, addon-controller #2024, dashboard #199, sveltosctl #454

Kubernetes Events for Failures and Cluster State
Errors that were only in the logs or in a status field are now recorded as events, so they show in kubectl describe and in the events of the namespace. addon-controller records FeatureFailed when a feature fails and is retried. Before, an event was recorded only for failures that are not retried. Classifier records ClassifierFailed and ClassifierLabelConflict, and event-manager records EventTriggerFailed when an EventTrigger fails to deploy or an EventReport cannot be processed. sveltoscluster-manager records an event when a SveltosCluster goes down (AgentUnhealthy in pull mode, ClusterUnreachable in push mode) and ClusterRecovered when it is back. An event is recorded when the failure is new or different, not on every retry, and not for expected states such as a paused cluster. All reasons come from a shared vocabulary in libsveltos. See the upgrade note: the reasons of the events addon-controller already recorded changed.
PRs: libsveltos #703, libsveltos #704, classifier #523, sveltoscluster-manager #390, addon-controller #2032, event-manager #526

Health Monitoring of Deployed Resources
ClusterProfile, Profile and ClusterPromotion have an opt-in healthMonitoring section. When enabled, once every feature of a ClusterSummary is provisioned, addon-controller creates a HealthCheck and a ClusterHealthCheck for it. The default checks cover Deployment, StatefulSet, DaemonSet, Job and PersistentVolumeClaim and report Healthy, Progressing, Degraded or Suspended. Only the resources deployed by the profile are evaluated, including the ones from Helm charts. A ClusterProfile can add its own HealthChecks, or turn the default checks off and use only those. This answers what is unhealthy on a cluster among what Sveltos deployed, separately from validateHealths, which only gates the deployment. The dashboard shows a health badge on each cluster card, a Health column in the Profiles tab and an Unhealthy resources tab with filters. sveltosctl has a new command, show unhealthy-resources, that lists the resources that are not healthy with the profile owning each of them. sveltos-agent caches every object of the monitored kinds in the cluster, about 20 KB of heap per object, whatever the number of profiles that enable monitoring.
PRs: addon-controller #2037, addon-controller #2042, ui-backend #193, dashboard #201, sveltosctl #455

ClusterHealthCheck: ClusterRefs
A ClusterHealthCheck can list clusters by reference in clusterRefs, in addition to selecting them with clusterSelector. The two sets are added together and a cluster that is in both is counted once.
PR: healthcheck-manager #445

Dashboard: Matching Resources per Cluster on an EventTrigger
An EventTrigger can match hundreds of resources in a cluster, and listing all of them made the details page long and slow. Each cluster card now shows the number of matching resources, and clicking it opens a dialog with the list. The list is loaded on demand from a new paginated endpoint, with filters on kind, namespace and name. In ui-backend, /event returns matchingResourcesCount for each cluster instead of the resources array.
PRs: ui-backend #195, dashboard #202

Dashboard: Profile Rollout State
When a profile sets maxUpdate, the clusters not yet reached still run the previous configuration, but they looked provisioned. The profile page now shows a rollout state for each matching cluster: updated, updating, waiting because maxUpdate is reached, paused or not ready. A summary shows the number of clusters in each state and the resolved maxUpdate while a rollout is pending.
PRs: ui-backend #198, dashboard #204

⚙️ Improvements

addon-controller: Stop Polling Profile Deletion While Clusters Are Paused
The ClusterSummary of a paused cluster is not removed until the cluster is unpaused, and a ClusterProfile or Profile being deleted polled for it every 10 seconds, logging an error each time. On a management cluster with a few paused clusters that was about 2,100 errors in 35 minutes. The profile now logs once, waits, and is reconciled again when a paused cluster is unpaused. It keeps polling as before if any remaining ClusterSummary is for a cluster that is not paused.
PR: addon-controller #2023

SveltosCluster with Connection Down Is Not Ready to Be Configured
A SveltosCluster whose connection is down kept Status.Ready true, so it was still processed. It is now skipped and reconciled again when the connection is back. addon-controller no longer tries to collect ResourceSummaries from, or upgrade drift-detection-manager in, a cluster it cannot reach, which removes the repeated compatibility check and i/o timeout errors. Pull mode is unaffected.
PRs: libsveltos #702, addon-controller #2028

ui-backend: Skip the Per-Cluster Access Check When the User Can Get All Clusters
GET /profile checked access with one SubjectAccessReview for each matching cluster. It now first asks once per cluster type whether the user can get all clusters, and if so skips the per-cluster checks. For a profile matching 1,000 clusters that is one call instead of 1,000, and a request went from 238 ms to 1.4 ms on envtest. A user limited to some clusters gets the same result as before, through the per-cluster check.
PR: ui-backend #199

🐞 Bug Fixes

ui-backend: Malformed Bearer Header and OIDC Proxy Diagnostics
An Authorization header with Bearer and no token made ui-backend panic and return a 500. A malformed header or an empty token now gets a 401. When the token of a dashboard user is refused, the log now says what kind of token it was (JWT, Kubernetes ServiceAccount token or opaque), its issuer, audience and expiry, and the host it was sent to, never the token itself. With an OIDC proxy, a ServiceAccount token also gets a hint that the proxy needs token passthrough enabled.
PR: ui-backend #188

ui-backend: ClusterProfile Content Created in the Wrong Namespace
Creating a ClusterProfile from pasted YAML in the dashboard stored its ConfigMap in the hardcoded projectsveltos namespace, so it failed when Sveltos is installed in another namespace. ui-backend now creates it in the namespace it runs in, read from the NAMESPACE environment variable set through the downward API, and falls back to projectsveltos when it is not set.
PR: ui-backend #197

addon-controller: upgradeCRDs Skipp...

v1.16.0

🚀 New Features

Pull Mode with Short-Lived Tokens
Pull mode no longer needs long-lived credentials. The agents in the managed cluster authenticate with short-lived tokens, which shrinks the exposure window if a credential leaks.
PRs: sveltoscluster-manager #382, sveltosctl #450, sveltos #794

Pull Mode with Limited RBACs
The components that run in pull mode can work with a reduced set of permissions. The agents only get the access they need on the managed cluster.
PR: classifier #515

CleanupGracePeriod
A grace period can now be set for cleanup of Sveltos resources on a cluster. This avoids premature removal during short disconnections or transient issues.
PRs: libsveltos #686, sveltoscluster-manager #384

sveltos-agent Reports Processing Errors
Errors that sveltos-agent hits while processing EventSources, Classifiers and HealthChecks are now reported. You can see why an instance is not being evaluated without digging through agent logs.

HealthCheck: Consecutive Checks
A HealthCheck can require several consecutive evaluations before the result changes. One-off flaps are filtered out without extra tooling.
PRs: sveltos #803, libsveltos #694

RemoteURL as a Template
remoteURL can be expressed as a template, so one profile can resolve to a different source for each matching cluster.
PR: addon-controller #2001

Dashboard: OIDC Proxy Support and Profile Editing
The dashboard can sit behind an oidc-proxy. Profiles can also be created and edited directly from the dashboard.
PRs: ui-backend #185, dashboard #190

🐞 Bug Fixes

addon-controller: Report Why a Profile Is Not Deployed When a Dependency Is Missing
When a profile depends on one that does not exist, the status now says so. Before, the profile just stayed undeployed with no explanation.
PR: addon-controller #1969

addon-controller: Stale Helm Conflict Not Cleared
A Helm conflict that had been resolved could stay in the status. It is now cleared.
PR: addon-controller #1975

addon-controller: Pull-Mode Helm Ignored createNamespace: false
In pull mode, Helm charts created the target namespace even when createNamespace was set to false. The setting is now honored.
PR: addon-controller #1982

addon-controller: Respect Order When Uninstalling Helm Releases
Releases are now uninstalled in the correct order, so ordering dependencies no longer cause failures on removal.
PR: addon-controller #1984

classifier: Label Keys Removed from spec.classifierLabels Were Not Dropped
When a key was removed from spec.classifierLabels, the label stayed on the cluster. The classifier now removes it.
PR: classifier #518

addon-controller: Deploy CRDs First When policyRefs Reference a remoteURL with an OCI Image
CRDs are now deployed before the other resources, so custom resources from the same OCI image no longer fail to apply.
PR: addon-controller #2005

addon-controller: MaxConsecutiveFailures Honored for validateHealth Failures
MaxConsecutiveFailures now also applies to validateHealth failures. Before, it did not.
PR: addon-controller #2006

addon-controller: ClusterConfiguration Cache Race with ClusterProfile Reconciliations
A race between the ClusterConfiguration cache and ClusterProfile reconciliations could leave stale data. It is fixed.
PR: addon-controller #2007

addon-controller: ClusterPromotion and Referenced Resource Issues
This fixes issues with ClusterPromotion and the resources it references.
PR: addon-controller #2012

🔧 Maintenance

All components advanced to Go v1.27.1.

All components advanced to Cluster API v1.14.2.

v1.14.0

🚀 New Features

Job-Based Health Checks
ValidateHealth gains JobCheck, a third check type alongside the existing Lua Script and CEL evaluation: point it at a Job manifest (via JobRef, stored in a Secret or ConfigMap) and its Complete/Failed outcome becomes the check result, mutually exclusive with the other two. Since ValidateHealth is embedded by both ClusterProfile/Profile and ClusterPromotion, it's available to PreDeployChecks, ValidateHealths, PreDeleteChecks, PostDeleteChecks, and PostDelayHealthChecks with no further changes.
PRs: libsveltos #654, sveltos #775

Per-Resource Force Recreate
KustomizationRef.Force/PolicyRef.Force applied all-or-nothing to every resource in a reference. A single resource can now opt into force-recreate on its own by carrying the projectsveltos.io/forceRecreate annotation, even when the reference-level Force is false.
PR: libsveltos #655

Gzip-Compressed and bsdtar-Produced OCI RemoteURL Layers
RemoteURL's oci:// path had two gaps that caused real-world OCI artifacts to fail or get misread: a gzip-compressed tar layer failed the tar parse and fell through to the raw-blob path, so the compressed bytes were handed downstream as if they were YAML; and AppleDouble/PAX sidecar entries produced by tools like macOS's bsdtar (e.g. ._ns.yaml next to ns.yaml) were matched by extension alone and swept into the manifest as binary garbage. Both are now filtered and decompressed correctly.
PR: addon-controller #1911

RemoteURL Tarball Support and Insecure-Connection Options
PolicyRefs' remoteURL over HTTP/HTTPS now accepts a tarball of multiple YAMsed or plain), not just a single raw document. RemoteURL/RemoteKustomizeURLalso gain two optional fields: plainHTTP to connect to an OCI registry over plain HTTP, and insecureSkipTLSVerify to skip server certificate verification, matching the trust optalready available for Helm OCI registries.
PRs: sveltos #780, addon-controller #1913

⚙️ Improvements

Reduced CRD Watcher Memory Usage
WatchCustomResourceDefinition kept every CustomResourceDefinition on the cluster in a local indexed cache for the life of the process, even though every caller only reads the GVK carried by the event that fires and none of them ever read the cache back. It's now backed by a Reflector that forwards each event straight to the handler and discards it, keeping the same list-then-watch/relist-on-error behavior without the resident memory. Most visible on sveltos-agent, in clusters with many CRDs installed.
PR: libsveltos #659

Helm Drift Redeploy Scoped Per Chart
With syncMode: ContinuousWithDriftDetection deploying multiple Helm charts from one ClusterProfile, drift on a single resource used to mark the entire Helm feature for redeploy and unconditionally upgrade every chart, regardless of whether it had drifted or even changed. Redeploy now checks a per-chart flag first, so a chart that neither drifted nor changed is left alone.
PR: addon-controller #1915

sveltos-agent: Reduced ConfigMap Memory Usage in Agentless Mode
In agentless mode, sveltos-agent's cache already scoped ConfigMaps by cluster namespace, but cached every ConfigMap in that namespace in full, including unrelated Helm-values or raw-YAML ConfigMaps deployed via policyRefs. It's now filtered by name to just the ConfigMap relevant to that cluster.

🐞 Bug Fixes

addon-controller: DeploymentType Local Cleanup on a Self-Managed Cluster
When the managed cluster is a self-managed SveltosCluster (its remote client/config resolve back to the management cluster itself), the remote-cluster stale-resource cleanup pass scanned the management cluster with no per-ClusterSummary scoping, deleting same-GVK resources deployed there by other ClusterSummary instances via deploymentType: Local. Every deployed resource is now tagged with its owning ClusterSummary, and both cleanup passes honor that tag, checking it only as a protective signal so pre-upgrade resources without it still fall through to the existing ownership checks.
PR: addon-controller #1892

sveltos-agent: Watching GVKs From Other Clusters in Agentless Mode
The GVK-watch-building path for Reloaders, EventSources, and HealthChecks listed every instance in the management cluster instead of scoping to the managed cluster an agent instance is responsible for, so an agent could enable ConfigMap/Secret watches or start informers for kinds only relevant to a different cluster's policies. Now filtered against each cluster's own tracking ConfigMap, matching the scoping the reconcilers already applied.

addon-controller: Reloader Not Cleaned Up on ClusterProfile Delete
Deleting, or unmatching, a Helm-based ClusterProfile with spec.reloader: true left its Reloader instance, and in agentless mode its per-cluster ConfigMap entry, behind indefinitely, referencing Deployments from a chart no longer deployed. The undeploy path was tagging the cleanup with the Kustomize feature instead of Helm, so both lookups silently missed. Resources- and Kustomize-based profiles were unaffected.
PR: addon-controller #1898

healthcheck-manager: Stale ClusterHealthCheck Conditions and Notifications
Three compounding bugs kept Status.Conditions and notifications frozen even as the underlying HealthCheckReport kept updating: Spec.HealthCheckName was never populated on HealthCheckReport, the watch mapper relied on that same empty field and resolved to zero ClusterHealthChecks to reconcile, and re-evaluation was skipped for clusters already Provisioned. Also fixes related Discord/Slack formatting bugs.
PR: healthcheck-manager #421

addon-controller: Failed Helm Upgrade Could Silently Uninstall the Release
A failed Helm upgrade still leaves a release record behind, stamped with the version it tried, and failed, to reach. That made the install/upgrade decision misread the release as already handled, and after a couple more failures deleted it and reinstalled from scratch. The decision now checks whether a release exists at all instead of inferring it from version/status, and the install-retry threshold is now its own setting, HelmInstallOptions.RecoverAfterConsecutiveFailures (default 5), instead of being borrowed from Helm's revision-retention MaxHistory.
PR: addon-controller #1912

addon-controller: Four ClusterSummary Reconcile Bugs
A transient, non-NotFound error checking whether a cluster still exists was treated as "cluster present," which could stall a ClusterSummary in Terminating indefinitely. One cluster's stale ResourceSummary cleanup could be blocked by an unrelated cluster's same-named ResourceSummary. Helm chart downloads via LocateChart had no timeout and could wedge a deployer worker permanently. And deletion didn't honor dependsOn ordering, letting a prerequisite and its dependent undeploy concurrently in any order.
PR: addon-controller #1918

Expired Kubeconfig Tokens Not Evicted From Cache
An expired token only surfaces on first actual use of a cached client, not when the client is built, so classifier, event-manager, and healthcheck-manager kept retrying the same stale credentials indefinitely. The client is now evicted from cache on an auth error so the next cycle rebuilds it from a freshly read kubeconfig Secret.
PRs: event-manager #512, classifier #500, healthcheck-manager #424

healthcheck-manager: Notification Events Truncated to Kubernetes' Limit
Notification Event messages could exceed the 1024-character limit Kubernetes enforces on Event messages; they're now truncated to fit.
PR: healthcheck-manager #425

🔧 Maintenance

• All components advanced to Cluster API v1.14.0
• All components advanced to Go 1.26.6

v1.13.0

🚀 New Features

Detect Outdated Helm Chart Versions
Sveltos now periodically checks whether a Helm chart deployed through a ClusterProfile or Profile has a newer version, or a newer same-minor patch, published upstream (HTTP repository or OCI registry). This is detection only: nothing about what gets deployed changes automatically. The result is recorded directly on the ClusterSummary that owns the release, alongside the chart identity already resolved at deploy time, so it's visible per cluster rather than blended across a fleet. latestVersion/latestPatchVersion are only populated when something newer genuinely exists; lastCheckedTime advances on every check regardless of outcome, distinguishing "confirmed up to date" from "not yet checked." A background process (main instance only, to avoid duplicate work across shards) groups deployments that are the same chart from the same source and checks each once; unreachable repositories/registries are skipped and logged rather than blocking the rest, and each check has a timeout. Metrics expose which deployments are behind and the health of the checker itself (last run, failure count). The check interval is configurable and can be disabled.
The dashboard surfaces this in three places: cluster list cards show an icon when a cluster has one or more releases with a newer version or patch available; the addon table on a cluster's detail page gains an "Update Available" column; and a new "Updates" button in the cluster heading queries mcp-server on demand and lists outdated releases with their current and latest available versions.
sveltosctl gets the CLI equivalent: a new show helm-updates command displays, per cluster, every Helm release with a newer version or patch available, filterable by namespace, cluster name, and cluster type. Separately, MCP query failures (as opposed to a successful-but-empty response) now show a distinct "Unable to reach the MCP server" message across all MCP-backed dashboard panels, instead of being indistinguishable from "nothing to report."
PRs: addon-controller #1883, sveltos #772, ui-backend #177, dashboard #180, sveltosctl #442

RemoteURL Support for KustomizationRefs
KustomizationRef.RemoteURL lets a KustomizationRef fetch its content directly from an HTTP/HTTPS endpoint or an OCI registry PolicyRef.RemoteURL. Unlike PolicyRef's OCI path, which flattens all YAML/JSON files across layers into one concatenated blob, this path preserves the fetched content's directory structure, since Kustomize needs it. Namespace/Name/Kind are now optional on KustomizationRef (required only when RemoteURL is unset), and hashing/periodic re-fetch both cover RemoteURL-based refs the same way they already do for PolicyRef.
PR: addon-controller #1882

Instantiate Path/Components Using TemplateResourceRefs
PolicyRef.Path and KustomizationRef.Path/Components can now be Go templates instantiated using TemplateResourceRefs data, not just cluster information. This lets a Kustomize overlay path or PolicyRef directory be selected dynamically based on resources read from the management cluster, instead of being fixed per profile.
PR: addon-controller #1868

Helm Post-Render Strategies
HelmChart.Options gains PostRenderStrategy, controlling whether Helm hooks are included when Patches/PatchesFrom are applied as a post-renderer during install/upgrade: combined (Helm's own default, hooks and templates sent together), separate (hooks and templates sent to the post-renderer in independent invocations, avoiding duplicate-resource errors from post-renderers that de-duplicate by resource identity), or nohooks (only regular templates are post-rendered, matching Helm 3's behavior). Only relevant when Patches or PatchesFrom is set.
PR: addon-controller #1866

EventTrigger Errors Surfaced in EventReport Status
When event-manager processes an EventReport and fails to instantiate the resulting ClusterProfile(s), the error used to be visible only in event-manager's own logs. It's now recorded directly on EventReport.Status, so the failure is visible on the object itself instead of requiring log access.
PR: event-manager #502

mcp-server: Event/Classifier Failure Reporting and Fleet-Wide Label Visibility
Event pipeline tracing now surfaces the error event-manager records when it fails to instantiate a ClusterProfile from an EventReport, so tracing an event-driven deployment tells you directly why no profile was created. Classifier pipeline tracing now also covers ManagementClusterClassifier: tracing by name checks both kinds automatically, reporting cluster match, reconcile failures (bad Lua, resource collection errors), and label ownership/conflicts for either. A new fleet-wide tool lists every label currently being managed by any Classifier or ManagementClusterClassifier across all (or a filtered subset of) managed clusters, along with label ownership and conflicts, mirroring sveltosctl show classifier-labels. Two diagnostic bugs were also fixed: installation health checks reporting agent verification failures as a blank reason, and blocked-dependency names being concatenated with no separator in deployment-error/dependency-analysis output.
The Sveltos MCP Server now exposes 22 tools in total.
PR: mcp-server #63

Dashboard: Classifier View
The dashboard now displays Classifier and ManagementClusterClassifier instances, each showing the number of labels it would set and the number of matching clusters. Selecting an instance lists all matching clusters, inline with the existing Events tab. An "Analyze Pipeline" action calls a new MCP tool that verifies a classifier/cluster pair end to end. The overview section also gains Classifier/ManagementClusterClassifier counts.
PRs: ui-backend #176, dashboard #179

Metrics Across the Fleet
addon-controller, event-manager, and sveltoscluster-manager gain a consistent metrics model, replacing ad hoc or cardinality-unsafe gauges/histograms with properly labeled ones (cluster_type, cluster_namespace, cluster_name, and a *_name label per component's own resource): reconcile duration, reconcile outcome (success/failure with the owning profile/trigger), and last-success timestamp, plus component-specific additions: matching_clusters (addon-controller, event-manager), matching_resources (event-manager), connection_failures and agent_last_heartbeat_timestamp_seconds (sveltoscluster-manager). sveltoscluster-manager also fixes two correctness bugs: a stale Kubernetes-version label combination was never removed after a cluster upgraded, and no metric was ever cleaned up when a cluster was deregistered. All components now correctly prefix metrics with projectsveltos_ and ship the auth-proxy RBAC needed to actually scrape /metrics. A Grafana dashboard is available covering the new metrics.
PRs: sveltoscluster-manager #372, event-manager #503, addon-controller #1872, sveltos #768

Recover From Rejected Updates via Force Recreate
PolicyRef/KustomizationRef gain a Force option. Server-side apply cannot always reconcile a manifest change: if a field was set by API server defaulting (or is owned by an unknown field manager) and the new manifest introduces a conflicting value, the apply is rejected and no patch can clear it (e.g. a Deployment moving to strategy.type: Recreate while the API server's previously-defaulted rollingUpdate is still set). When Force is set and an apply is rejected with an error only a delete+recreate can resolve, the object is now deleted and recreated instead of surfacing the error. Never applies to CustomResourceDefinitions, since deleting one cascades to every instance of it, and conflicts (already handled by retry-in-place) are excluded.
PRs: libsveltos #642, addon-controller #1877

---

⚙️ Improvements

Shared, Cached Managed-Cluster Clients
The cluster rest.Config/mapper/discovery-client cache moves from addon-controller-local code into lib/clustercache in libsveltos, so addon-controller, classifier, healthcheck-manager, event-manager, and access-manager all share the same cache instead of each building a fresh client (with a live discovery round-trip) on every call, or managing their own cache independently. The shared cache also adds InvalidateOnAuthError, evicting a cluster's cached client (and the underlying workload-identity cache entry) as soon as the API server rejects credentials with 401/403, instead of waiting for TTL expiry or an explicit cluster delete.
PRs: libsveltos #644, classifier #489, healthcheck-manager #417, event-manager [#505](https://github.com/projectsveltos/event-ma...

v1.12.0

🚀 New Features

Supply Chain Verification for Helm Charts
Sveltos can now verify the integrity and origin of a Helm chart before deploying it, with two mechanisms targeting different chart sources. For charts pulled from OCI registries, Sveltos verifies the Cosign signature attached to the chart: a PublicKey provider checks it against a static key stored in a Kubernetes Secret, while a Keyless provider verifies the Fulcio-issued certificate against an expected OIDC issuer/subject and confirms the signing event was recorded in the Rekor transparency log, so the chart must have been signed by a specific pipeline in a specific repository. Both providers support the Sigstore Bundle v0.3 OCI referrer format and fall back to the legacy tag-based signature format. For charts pulled from HTTP repositories, Sveltos verifies the Helm .prov provenance file against a GPG keyring stored in a Secret. In both cases a failed verification blocks the deployment and the reason is recorded on the ClusterSummary status; charts without a verification field deploy as before.
PRs: addon-controller #1842, sveltos #753

Workload Identity Support
SveltosCluster now supports authenticating to a managed cluster using the cloud provider's native workload identity instead of a stored kubeconfig Secret: AWS (IRSA / EKS Pod Identity), GCP (Workload Identity Federation), and Azure (Azure Workload Identity). When configured, Sveltos obtains short-lived credentials directly from the cloud provider, caching them in-process and refreshing proactively before expiry. sveltosctl register cluster has been extended to configure workload identity when registering a cluster.
PRs: libsveltos #636, sveltosctl #434

OCI Support in PolicyRef
RemoteURL in PolicyRef now accepts oci:// URLs in addition to http:// and https://. Sveltos pulls the OCI artifact from the registry on each reconciliation at the configured interval, computes a content hash, and redeploys when the content changes, identical to the existing HTTP polling behavior. Authentication uses the same secretRef field, supporting a bearer token, basic auth, or a custom CA certificate. Both a tar archive (the standard ORAS/Flux format) and a raw YAML/JSON blob are supported as artifact layouts.
PR: addon-controller #1851

Classify Clusters from Management Cluster Resources
Classifier evaluates rules against resources inside each managed cluster, which leaves a gap when the classification signal instead lives on the management cluster itself, such as a Crossplane Composite Resource created when a team orders an addon on an Internal Developer Platform. A new ManagementClusterClassifier resource closes that gap: it watches resources on the management cluster and runs a Lua function that receives the full set of matched resources and returns which managed clusters should be labeled. A ManagementClusterClassifierReport tracks label ownership per classifier/cluster pair, giving the same conflict detection the existing Classifier provides.
PR: classifier #482

sveltosctl: show classifier-labels
A new sveltosctl show classifier-labels command displays the labels that Classifier and ManagementClusterClassifier instances are actively managing on each cluster, along with the name of the instance that owns each label.
PR: sveltosctl #437

---

⚙️ Improvements

sveltos-agent: Reduced Memory Usage in Agentless Mode
In agentless mode, each sveltos-agent instance runs in the management cluster and is responsible for a single managed cluster, but its controller-runtime cache had no namespace or label restrictions, so every agent's informer held HealthCheckReport, EventReport, and ConfigMap objects for all managed clusters, causing O(N) memory per agent and O(N²) total. The cache is now scoped per agent: HealthCheckReport and EventReport are restricted with a label selector matching the agent's cluster name and type, and the per-cluster ConfigMap is restricted with a field selector on its name.
PR: sveltos-agent #493

addon-controller: Condition-Based Wait for CRD Reapply
When a Helm chart is deployed with UpgradeCRDs: true, the controller used to sleep for 30 seconds after applying the chart's CRD files on every reconcile, regardless of whether the CRDs had actually changed, which was especially costly in ContinuousWithDriftDetection sync mode. The sleep is replaced with a poll against the destination cluster's CRD status, returning as soon as each CRD's Established and NamesAccepted conditions are true, effectively zero delay when CRDs are already established and no more than necessary for a genuine upgrade.
PR: addon-controller #1844

---

🐞 Bug Fixes

sveltos-agent: Reloader Feature Broken in Agentless Mode
In agentless mode, sveltos-agent watched every Reloader instance in the management cluster instead of only the subset belonging to its own managed cluster, and watched ConfigMap/Secret objects in the management cluster instead of the managed cluster. Both are now scoped correctly.
PR: sveltos-agent #494

addon-controller: Tier Change Not Triggering Takeover
Once a ClusterProfile was managing a chart, its tier was never compared against other conflicting profiles on later reconciliations, so raising a profile's tier above a challenger stuck in FailedNonRetriable never woke the challenger up. Tier comparison now runs on every reconcile even for the profile currently managing the chart, so a higher-tier challenger correctly reclaims it.
PR: addon-controller #1837

access-manager: Configurable Namespace
The Sveltos namespace was hardcoded to projectsveltos; this closes a gap missed in the previous release by allowing it to be configurable, part of the broader effort to remove that limitation across components.
PR: access-manager #348

classifier: Upgrade Blocked by Deleted Clusters
The migration init container that upgrades deprecated ClusterInfo entries into ClassifierReport objects would crash-loop and block the upgrade entirely if a managed cluster had been deleted before the upgrade, since its namespace no longer existed. Entries whose cluster namespace is gone are now logged at debug level and skipped, while all other entries migrate normally.
PR: classifier #480

sveltos-agent: Wait for Informer to Be Synced
In agentless mode, sveltos-agent can restart its internal controller-manager without a pod restart, for example when a managed cluster's kubeconfig token expires or a CRD change is detected. If an EventSource was evaluated in the window before the new informers had synced, it returned an empty result that was misread as zero matching resources, causing event-manager to delete previously created ClusterProfiles. An unsynced informer is now treated as a transient error and the evaluation is retried once the informers have synced.
PR: sveltos-agent #495

🔧 Maintenance

• All components advanced to Cluster API v1.13.3
• All components advanced to Kubernetes client-go v1.36.2

v1.11.1

🐞 Bug Fixes

ClusterProfile deletion no longer stalls (addon-controller #1829 (projectsveltos/addon-controller#1829))
Fixed a bug where deleting a ClusterProfile could get stuck indefinitely. The allMatchingProfilesProcessed check was not skipping other profiles that were themselves already being deleted, causing the controller to wait forever for work that would never complete.

MCP compare-clusters tool reliability (mcp-server #57 (projectsveltos/mcp-server#57))
Corrected several issues in the compare_managed_clusters MCP tool. A not-found cluster now surfaces a clear error instead of silently returning an empty result. Additionally, when a cluster exists but its ClusterConfiguration has not yet been created (resources still deploying), the tool now returns a non-fatal warning in the output rather than returning misleading empty comparison data.

Spurious pending-updates indicator in the UI (ui-backend #171 (projectsveltos/ui-backend#171))
Fixed incorrect cluster status reporting in the UI backend. A cluster was wrongly flagged as having pending updates when a profile matched it and that profile had declared dependencies. The status is now computed correctly in those cases.

v1.11.0

🚀 New Features

Health Checks: Metric-Based Validation
ValidateHealth now supports querying a Prometheus-compatible endpoint as an additional data source. Named scalar values are exposed to the Lua evaluate() function via a metrics table, enabling checks such as "error rate below 5 %". In push mode the endpoint must be reachable from the management cluster; in pull mode the sveltos-applier agent running inside the managed cluster reaches it directly via in-cluster DNS.
PR: addon-controller #1816 (projectsveltos/addon-controller#1816)

Kubernetes Events for Deployment Failures
The addon-controller now raises Kubernetes Warning events to make failure causes immediately visible via kubectl describe or any event-watching tool. Events are emitted for conflicts, missing referenced resources, template instantiation errors, and when the controller gives up after reaching the maximum consecutive failure count.
PR: addon-controller #1815 (projectsveltos/addon-controller#1815)

Dashboard: Cluster Deployment Health Signals
The cluster list now surfaces deployment state at a glance. An amber alert icon appears when one or more profile deployments are failing; a blue clock icon appears when deployment is actively in progress with no failures. The ui-backend computes these signals as O(1) in-memory indexes updated by the existing ClusterSummary watcher, so no per-request scanning is required.
PRs: dashboard #173 (projectsveltos/dashboard#173), ui-backend #167 (projectsveltos/ui-backend#167)

HealthCheck: Surface "No Resources Found" as a Degraded Status
When a HealthCheck's resource selectors matched nothing, the resulting HealthCheckReport was silently empty and sveltosctl show resources showed nothing. The Lua evaluate() function can now detect an empty resources table and return a top-level degraded status (e.g. "No deployments found in namespace metrics"), which is surfaced in the report and in sveltosctl.
PR: sveltos-agent #489 (projectsveltos/sveltos-agent#489)

MCP Server: Classifier Pipeline Analysis Tool
A new tool has been added to the Sveltos MCP server to analyze classifier pipelines, making it easier to inspect and reason about classifier configuration via AI-assisted workflows.
PR: mcp-server #55 (projectsveltos/mcp-server#55)

Shard-Controller: Patch Support
A new --shard-components-config flag accepts the name of a ConfigMap in the Sveltos namespace. The ConfigMap holds one or more patches (JSON6902 or strategic-merge) that are applied to the five Deployments shard-controller creates per shard. Target selectors allow a single ConfigMap to patch only specific components. When the ConfigMap changes, a dedicated reconciler re-deploys all active shards immediately so patches take effect without restarting shard-controller.
PR: shard-controller #216 (projectsveltos/shard-controller#216)

---

🐞 Bug Fixes

addon-controller: Logging, Pull-Mode Status Handler, Helm Data Race, and Dependency Manager
Fixed a logging mistake where cluster name was populated with the cluster namespace in two places. Corrected the pull-mode agent status handler, which could reach a nil dereference when the agent returned an error without a status payload. Fixed a data race in the Helm chart manager where a shared map was read without holding the mutex. The dependency manager's background update loop now snapshots work, releases the write lock before making API calls, and re-acquires it only to clear completed entries — unblocking concurrent reconcilers. Its startup rebuild loop now waits 5 seconds between retries instead of spinning at full speed on API errors.
PR: addon-controller #1823 (projectsveltos/addon-controller#1823)

sveltos-applier: ClassifierReport Retry, Discovery Loop, and Namespace Client Reuse
ClassifierReports were silently marked as delivered even when the push to the management cluster failed, so they were never rld also continue with an empty Classifier object on non-NotFound API errors. The discovery retry loop in the REST mapperrefresh executed exactly once regardless of the loop variable, causing immediate failure on transient API server slowness. A new Kubernetes client — and with it a new HTTP connection pool — was being created for every single resource that needed a namespace ensured; it is now
created once per reconciliation pass.
PR: sveltos-applier #89 (projectsveltos/sveltos-applier#89)

sveltos-agent: Handful Bugs in the Evaluation Package
Nine bugs in the evaluation package have been corrected.
PR: sveltos-agent #490 (projectsveltos/sveltos-agent#490)

---

🔧 Maintenance

• All components advanced to Go v1.26.4
• All components advanced to golangci-lint v1.12.1

---

v1.10.0

🚀 New Features

OIDC Authentication in Dashboard

Users can now log into the Sveltos dashboard using OpenID Connect (Authorization Code Flow with a public client), as an alternative to manual token authentication.

PR: dashboard #160 (projectsveltos/dashboard#160)

🐞 Bug Fixes

EventManager: Ordered Removal of Resources

When stale ClusterProfile resources were being cleaned up by the event-manager, referenced resources could be removed before the ClusterProfile was fully deleted, causing ordering violations. Sveltos now waits for stale ClusterProfiles to be fully deleted before removing their referenced resources.

PR: event-manager #485 (projectsveltos/event-manager#485)

---

addon-controller: Guaranteed Helm Chart Handoff Between Profiles

When a cluster atomically switched from one ClusterProfile to another (both referencing the same Helm chart), a race condition could cause a delete-and-reinstall instead of an in-place upgrade. Sveltos now verifies that every matching profile has had its ClusterSummary fully processed by the chart manager before allowing an uninstall, avoiding unnecessary downtime.

PR: addon-controller #1780 (projectsveltos/addon-controller#1780)

---

addon-controller: Surface Errors for Missing Non-Optional TemplateResourceRefs

When a non-optional resource referenced in TemplateResourceRefs was missing, no error was reported in the ClusterSummary, making it difficult to diagnose why a profile was not being deployed. The failure message is now surfaced directly in the ClusterSummary status.

PR: addon-controller #1790 (projectsveltos/addon-controller#1790)

---

shard-controller: Correct Flags for Init Container in Agentless Mode

When running in agentless mode, the agent-in-mgmt-cluster flag was not being set correctly for the addon-controller init container.

v1.9.0

🚀 New Features

Remote URL Support in PolicyRefs

Reference YAML content directly from HTTP/HTTPS endpoints: Previously, PolicyRef was limited to ConfigMaps and Secrets, which imposed an ~1 MB size cap. You can now define a remoteURL field pointing to any HTTP/HTTPS URL. Sveltos fetches and redeploys automatically whenever the content changes, driven by a configurable polling interval (default: 5 minutes).

Optional authentication via secretRef (token, username/password, or CA file) and Go template rendering are fully supported.

PR: addon-controller #1721

---

preDeployChecks

Gate deployments on cluster readiness: A new preDeployChecks field on ClusterProfile/Profile lets you define conditions that must pass before Sveltos deploys any resource. This provides a built-in operational gate — for example, blocking rollouts until a cluster reaches a healthy state.

PR: addon-controller #1753

---

Avoid Spurious Helm Upgrades

Stable revision counters after management cluster takeover: When a new management cluster reconciled clusters that already had Helm charts deployed, the absence of stored state caused Sveltos to run helm upgrade on every reconcile even when nothing had changed. Revision counters now remain stable on takeover. Charts with patches: configured and
ContinuousWithDriftDetection subsequent reconciliations are intentionally unaffected.

PR: addon-controller #1731

---

Show Addons: Filter by Helm Charts or Resources

Targeted addon inspection in sveltosctl: sveltosctl show addons gains two new flags — --helm-charts to display only Helm releases and --resources to display only Kubernetes resources. This makes it easier to inspect large deployments without noise from unrelated resource types.

PR: sveltosctl #427

---

Dashboard DryRun Information

Simulation results in the Sveltos dashboard: The Sveltos dashboard now surfaces DryRun simulation results. Operators can review exactly what changes would be applied to each cluster before committing a profile to active mode — without leaving the dashboard.

---

🐞 Bug Fixes

Drift Detection and KustomizationRefs

Configuration drift for KustomizationRef-deployed resources was not being detected or repaired. Resources deployed via KustomizationRefs (e.g. through a Flux GitRepository) are now correctly tracked by the drift-detection agent and reconciled when changed out-of-band.

PR: addon-controller #1723

---

Helm Chart Errors in Pull Mode

Partial ConfigurationBundle instances no longer reach the applier: When processing Helm charts in pull mode, an error mid-flight could cause a partially populated ConfigurationBundle to be committed. The applier would then treat missing resources as deleted, pruning live workloads or deploying broken stacks. Bundle preparation is now atomic — any error discards all
partial state before it can be committed.

PR: addon-controller #1725

---

ClusterPromotion/ClusterProfile Ordering

When ClusterPromotion creates ClusterProfile resources, the order of HelmCharts, KustomizationRefs, and PolicyRefs must be preserved. A bug was causing the order in generated ClusterProfile resources to diverge from the ClusterPromotion definition. This is now fixed.

PR: addon-controller #1736

---

EventTrigger: Stale Profiles on EventSource Change

When an EventTrigger's referenced EventSource was updated, the ClusterProfile, ConfigMap, and Secret resources created for the previous EventSource were left as stale orphans in the management cluster. These are now correctly cleaned up whenever the EventSource reference changes. ...

v1.8.0

🚀 New Features

GitOps Friendly Kubeconfig Renewal

Support for In-place Secret Updates: Previously, Sveltos rotated kubeconfigs by creating a new key (re-kubeconfig) and updating the SveltosCluster spec. This caused drift in GitOps tools like ArgoCD or Flux.

You can now define spec.tokenRequestRenewalOption.kubeconfigKeyName. If set to the original key name, Sveltos will overwrite the existing Secret in-place and skip updating the Spec, keeping your live state and Git source-of-truth in sync.

PR: sveltoscluster-manager 361

Enhanced Helm Testing

Native Helm Tests: Introduced RunTests in the Helm configuration. When set to true, Sveltos will automatically run Helm test hooks (helm.sh/hook: test) after successful installs or upgrades.

Failing tests will surface as deployment failures in the ClusterSummary status, providing an automated operational gate.

PR: addon-controller 1687

Flexible Namespace Management

Skip Namespace Creation: To support multi-tenant environments where Sveltos may have restricted RBAC (lacking cluster-wide Namespace permissions), we’ve introduced SkipNamespaceCreation to PolicyRef and KustomizationRef.

When enabled, Sveltos bypasses the check/creation logic and attempts to deploy resources directly into pre-provisioned namespaces.

PR: addon-controller 1685

🐞 Bug Fixes

Helm & Patching Consistency

• Patch-Triggered Redeployments: Fixed an issue where modifying Helm patches did not trigger a redeploy because the chart version and values remained unchanged. Sveltos now tracks a hash of the patches to accurately detect changes.

PR: addon-controller 1686

• Persistence of Failure Messages: Resolved a sequencing bug where FailureMessage for Helm releases was being overwritten in the API server before it could be persisted.

PR: addon-controller 1693

• Template Resolution in Summaries: Fixed a lookup failure where failure messages weren't being correctly mapped when ReleaseName or ReleaseNamespace contained Go templates.

PR: addon-controller 1693

Controller Robustness

• Out-of-band Deletions: Fixed a reconciliation deadlock that occurred if a ClusterSummary was deleted manually while the cluster was in an UpdatingClusters state. The controller now recovers gracefully by dropping the cluster from the update list and forcing a requeue.

PR: addon-controller 1704