GitOps Days 2021 Day 1 Recap: Evolution, Revolution, and Vision
On June 9-10 we hosted our third GitOps Days event and we are so grateful to the fantastic speakers who gave such informative talks over the two days. Read on for our recap of the first day - which included a look back, a look forward, and an exciting new product announcement.

On June 9-10 we hosted our third GitOps Days event and we are so grateful to the fantastic speakers who gave such informative talks over the two days. Thanks to all of you who joined to watch and chat on Slack for a truly interactive experience. Special thanks to “DJ Desired State,” aka Daniel Holbach, who kept the vibe fun and funky!
Playlist Round #1!
There were so many great talks at GitOps Days that this is the first of a series of blog posts sharing highlights and new videos that we’ll be adding to the GitOps Days 2021 playlist! This week, we’re sharing the opening keynotes that reflect on the rapid maturity of GitOps in the last year, the investment by the cloud vendors, the CNCF, and the DevOps Forum, and GitOps into the future including our exciting announcement of Weave GitOps Core!
The Evolution
At our very first GitOps Days in May 2020 we had some key thought leaders sharing how they had paved the way for GitOps in their organizations, and they helped the audience to advocate for GitOps. Fast forward just 12 months and GitOps Days 2021 shows how quickly we have matured in this space! GitOps definitions have developed and solidified within the CNCF GitOps Working Group (which lives under the OpenGitOps project) as well as have been explored by the DevOps Forum. Three of the keynote speakers were current or former TOC members of the CNCF and they shared helpful perspectives of GitOps in the enterprise.
GitOps truly represents the recognition that we have to do things differently, and the early highlights below from GitOps Days emphasize this point.
The Revolution
Cornelia Davis kicked off GitOps Days with her keynote “Has GitOps Hit an Inflection Point?” (spoiler alert - perhaps!) exploring the journey of Cloud Native computing and how the evolution of Cloud Native has led to the inflection point with GitOps today. She looks at how we’re poised for bigger things (cue OpenGitOps, GitOps Landscape, Certifications, and more).
GitOps at Scale with Cloud Solutions
Cloud vendors Microsoft and AWS shared how GitOps is core to their business, what they’re offering to their customers, and what their customers are asking from them. Microsoft demo’d their Arc Kubernetes product which offers their customers GitOps via Flux! Check out the keynotes: GitOps in Microsoft Azure with Flux - Chris Sanders & Jonathan Innis and Evolving DevOps to GitOps - Nathan Taber, AWS.
The Next Five Years
Justin Cormack, Chief Technology Officer at Docker and CNCF TOC member, shared his perspectives on the history of GitOps, open design areas, and the different paths we could take as GitOps grows in the next five years in the talk GitOps in the Next Five Years. Exploring supply chain security improvements, GitOps and registries, other artifact stores, GitOps without git, and GitOps at Scale; Justin proffered where he’d like us to go.
GitOps: The Consistent Operation Model
In her Day 1 closing keynote Cornelia reminds us that it’s the principles (declarative configuration, version controlled, and software agents that do both delivery and runtime operations of our applications) not the individual technologies that allow us to do GitOps. She goes on to explore concrete examples of what all the things are that you may want to GitOps, and how GItOps acts as the consistent operation model across all of these different things. Kubernetes workloads, Kubernetes cluster config, Kubernetes clusters, Infra: compute, storage, network, Databases, Search Services, Messaging, API gateways, Policies, IAM, and so on... Check out Cornelia’s informative keynote, GitOps All the Things.
The Easiest Way to GitOps!
In her talk Weave GitOps - It All Starts with the Developer Cornelia Davis, CTO at Weaveworks, announced the early release of our newest product Weave GitOps Core, a free, open source, opinionated GitOps product with a great developer experience. It’s meant to be the easiest way for you to use GitOps to optimize your software lifecycle, with a very turnkey getting started experience, and allows you to program your GitOps Automations. She goes on to live demo (with just a few commands) the easiest way you can get started with GitOps, then shows how to do custom configuration when you need to. Read more about Weave GitOps Core on our blog and product page.
Next Steps
We’ll continue to publish more videos to the GitOps Days 2021 Playlist, so stay tuned for more as they become available. And subscribe to our YouTube channel for more informational content around GitOps Days and more!