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Investigate usage of and maintenance status of Zarf and the Big Bang plugin

Summary

Investigate the current state of the Zarf tool as it relates to Big Bang and identify what changes (if any) need to be made to the Big Bang documentation related to its use.

Zarf History

The current big bang documentation for airgap customers references the use of Zarf, a tool for managing delivery of packages to air gapped kubernetes clusters. It was developed by Defense Unicorns but was donated to the Open Source Security Foundation (OSSF).

https://github.com/zarf-dev/zarf

https://docs-bigbang.dso.mil/latest/docs/guides/airgap-zarf/

There is a 3 year old customer guide for airgap in the Big Bang docs repo: https://repo1.dso.mil/big-bang/customers/air-gap-deployment/-/blob/main/airgap_quickstart.md?ref_type=heads

This documentation is very old and hasn't been tried in quite some time. The Zarf application requires a Big Bang plugin to correctly deliver Zarf packages for Big Bang:

https://github.com/defenseunicorns-partnerships/generate-big-bang-zarf-package

This package is quite old and hasn't been actively maintained in almost a year. There is some indication that this plugin may not be necessary any more:

See this Zarf proposal : https://github.com/zarf-dev/proposals/tree/main/0002-remove-big-bang

.... this issue : https://github.com/zarf-dev/zarf/issues/2875

... and this merge request: https://github.com/zarf-dev/zarf/pull/3059

Specific Questions

  • Can we still use Zarf to move packages from one Kubernetes cluster running Big Bang to an air-gapped cluster? Can we prove this with two k3d instances, one of which has no access to github, repo1 and registry1?
  • Is the Zarf Big Bang plugin still the appropriate way to perform this task?
  • What changes need to be made to the Big Bang Airgap documentation related to the usage of Zarf?
Edited by Andrew Kesterson