2022: A Year in GitOps
A look back over the key milestones in 2022, as GitOps gained momentum in the enterprise.
This year, GitOps really gathered momentum in the enterprise, thanks in no small part to a series of big Weaveworks milestones, from integration with Microsoft’s developer tools to the graduation of Flux at the CNCF. So let’s take a quick look back over the last twelve months.
2022 was a big year for GitOps and an even bigger year for Weaveworks. Over the course of the year, the Weaveworks team has worked incredibly hard on introducing various features to Weave GitOps that have transformed the model’s fortunes in the enterprise. It has been a sustained effort that has culminated in Flux CD, the open-source project that powers Weave GitOps, reaching Graduated status in the CNCF.
But more on that later. First, let’s go back to the beginning of the year and see where all this enterprise momentum came from.
January: Acquisition of Magalix
The year began with a bang, in the form of Weaveworks’ acquisition of Magalix, the Kubernetes policy experts. This was much more than just the purchase of another technology vendor because it enabled Weaveworks to strengthen the Weave GitOps product in the crucial area of Trusted Application Delivery, raising the bar for DevOps security. With a huge amount of cloud application security breaches made possible by misconfiguration, the ability to set guardrails for developers within a GitOps pipeline represented another step on the journey toward full automation of software delivery.
You can read more about the acquisition of Magalix, and learn what it means for Weave GitOps Enterprise.
March: Trusted Application Delivery Features Added to Weave GitOps Enterprise
Absorbing all that expertise was one thing, but there was still plenty of work to do before the policy features made possible by the Magalix acquisition could ship in the Weave GitOps product. Weave GitOps Enterprise platform integrated and released policy as code capabilities in the Trusted Application Delivery product release.
May: Integration With Microsoft Developer Tools
Policy aside, there was still a great deal of product evolution afoot – a process that saw fruition in May with the announcement of Weave GitOps’ integration with Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code IDE, as well as the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes for hybrid clouds.
The two companies’ three-year agreement encompassed strategic input, engineering, and customer support services, ensuring that enterprise customers who rely on Azure for their public or hybrid cloud infrastructure can benefit from the features of Weave GitOps, with developers able to deploy into GitOps delivery pipelines from within their IDE.
As Steve George, Weaveworks’ Chief Operating Officer, said at the time, “This integration addresses customers’ need for a consistent way to handle hybrid and multi-cloud complexities automatically, freeing software delivery teams to focus on innovation and accelerate trusted deliveries rather than on maintaining infrastructure. Weave GitOps Flux is a purpose-built solution to continuous delivery and security across environments.”
You can read more about the announcement, and about the Microsoft integration features.
May: Weaveworks at KubeCon EU 2022
Later that same month, the biggest event in Europe’s GitOps calendar got underway, in the form of KubeCon EU 2022, including GitOpsCon EU 2022. From introductions to GitOps down to explorations of technical subjects like Flux’s approach to secret decryption and simplifying service mesh operations, the Weaveworks team delivered a wide range of talks and demos. To see a list of the sessions and watch them again, check out our recap blog post.
July: Enterprise Adoption Reaches New Heights
By the middle of the year, it certainly seemed like all the hard work was paying off.
Weaveworks reported that enterprise revenue alone had doubled in less than a year, while in the first six months of 2022, their enterprise client base doubled in size. To cap it all, Flux, the open-source software agent that powers Weave GitOps, achieved a billion container image pulls in the first half of the year.
GitOps also began to gain traction beyond its use as a Kubernetes controller, notably when used in conjunction with Terraform. As Weaveworks CEO Alexis Richardson explained, “The Terraform controller makes the entire ecosystem of Terraform modules available in GitOps for configuring resources on any cloud and across different parts of the software stack including databases, networking, and security.”
September: Progressive Delivery is now Possible with Weave GitOps Enterprise
By September, the development of Weave GitOps Enterprise had gained even more momentum, with a new product release that made progressive delivery significantly easier. The update made it even quicker and easier for teams to deploy a service using progressive delivery features that constantly monitor the deployment – and crucially, automate the recovery process if any issues arise, by checking against data from the service itself. Weave GitOps Enterprise allows its users to select a deployment strategy (e.g. canary, blue/green, or split testing) and then deploy across all their Kubernetes environments, without making changes to the code – effectively making progressive delivery possible for any microservice. Learn more.
November: Weaveworks Attends KubeCon NA 2022
The biggest event in the global Kubernetes calendar is undoubtedly KubeCon, and the Weaveworks team was there in Detroit, in force. They either delivered or took part in numerous sessions, all of which reflected the growing acceptance of Kubernetes in the enterprise. The sessions covered a wide range of subjects, from observability to environmental sustainability in CI/CD. Learn more – and find links to all the sessions – in this blog post.
December: Flux Achieves CNCF Graduation Status
In many ways, we saved the best until last – because it wasn’t until this month that word spread about the biggest milestone of the year: Flux, the software agent at the heart of Weave GitOps, has just achieved Graduated Status at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) – meaning it has joined the ranks of famous cloud native projects such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Helm.
Flux is an open-source project with a vast number of contributors, and its development was initiated here at Weaveworks where a large team continues to work on it, full-time. It was donated to the CNCF in order to earn their validation and thereby boost its enterprise adoption – but in order to do that, it had to progress, slowly but surely, through the various CNCF stages, from Sandbox all the way to Graduation. That meant proving that Flux’s code, overall design, and future roadmap all meet the CNCF’s high standards. It meant passing an external security review. And it meant demonstrating that enough organizations now contribute to its code base to guarantee the project’s longevity. As we have made clear in this article, all-important enterprise adoption – for Flux, for the GitOps model, and for Weave GitOps Enterprise – is now entering a new phase. All of which bodes extremely well for 2023.
Read more about Flux’s graduation and what it means for GitOps in general.
Here’s to Next Year
With GitOps now firmly established in the enterprise and Flux a proud graduate of the CNCF, there can be no doubt that the momentum will grow in the year ahead. So from everyone here at Weaveworks and to all our readers, users and contributors, we wish you a fantastic 2023.
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