GitOps Days 2021 Recap: The Power of GitOps with Flux
Because there were so many great talks at GitOps Days, this is the second 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 some of the talks on one of our favorite GitOps tools: FluxCD! These talks cover a range of topics, from end-users who share their GitOps journey with Flux, to technical deep dives from Flux users, contributors, and maintainers.
After our third successful GitOps Days event, we want to reflect back on so many of the great talks that were delivered.
Playlist round #2!
Because there were so many great talks at GitOps Days, this is the second 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 some of the talks on one of our favorite GitOps tools: FluxCD! These talks cover a range of topics, from end-users who share their GitOps journey with Flux, to technical deep dives from Flux users, contributors, and maintainers.
Deep Dive with Maintainer, Stefan Prodan
For starters, Stefan Prodan, Developer Experience Engineer at Weaveworks, provided a Flux Deep Dive. He walked through what Flux is, who it’s for and its components. Then he gave a demo on how to use Flux for delivering infrastructure and application changes onto Kubernetes.
Platform Teams are reaping the benefits of GitOps with the power of Flux!
Mae Large, Architecture Manager, and Russ Parmer, Technology Engineer shared the many successes that they realized with the adoption of GitOps at State Farm in their talk From Wild West to Flux Multi-tenancy. They showcased how the adoption of GitOps is possible even in an already well-established multi-tenant cluster. The benefits for State Farm from GitOps continue to permeate throughout the organization. With the introduction of Flux’s Multi-tenancy capabilities they’ve achieved increased transparency which in turn promotes self-service among their users, and there’s less reliance on the Kubernetes Admin team, freeing them up to focus on other things. Mae stresses “It’s never too late to adopt GitOps...start using it!”
In the closing keynote, Building a Web Scale Internal Developer Platform at Alibaba,” Lei “Harry” Zhang shared Alibaba’s journey of building a modern Internal Developer Platform (IDP) with Kubernetes and beyond. This system, featuring the CNCF Sandbox project KubeVela (which leverages Flux and the GitOps Toolkit), has become the foundation of Alibaba’s core application infrastructure and has served thousands of developers, both internal and external.
In their talk, Sailing into Production and how GitOps Loops create autonomous Infrastructure, Maximilian Rink and Marcel Fest, DevOps Engineers from Deutsche Telekom, shared how their team built their own Kubernetes platform “Das Schiff” which is offered to their internal customers as a managed service. It is based around Flux and cluster-api and brings GitOps to the center of their large-scale infrastructure management. They shared some early mistakes made adopting GitOps, explained how Flux helped with solving many of those problems and showed what their current solution looks like and where they want to go in the future.
Vuk Gojoinc, Squad Lead, Container & Cloud-Native Engineer at Deutsche Telekom, expanded on how they set up GitOps Loops, using Flux and Cluster API (CAPI), to enable their large-scale infrastructure to find and maintain its state of equilibrium autonomously. Because this requires less maintenance and attendance, one of the major benefits has been freeing up their SRE team to allow them to do other things like managing many more instances of the infrastructure or dedicating more time to engineering. (Watch Vuk’s entire talk here: GitOps Loops A Step Towards Autonomous Infrastructure)
🤓 Nerding out with Flux: Gettin’ Techie with it!
Jordan Pellizzari, Software Engineer at Weaveworks and Flux contributor, started out the after hours portion of Day 1 with a walk through of the experimental Flux UI that is currently under development. Watch Jordan’s 4 min walkthrough here and please provide your feedback!
Leigh Capili gave us an under-the-covers look at how Flux's kustomize-controller tracks the child objects for a Kustomization in the Kubernetes API. He demonstrates how labels, checksums, and a GVK+Namespace list called the catalog can be used together to build detailed Object trees of everything Flux is managing in a cluster. This design is transparent, ergonomic, and performant! Learn how to use Flux's object tracking in your own extensions and UI's atop Flux and the GitOps Toolkit :) (watch: Flux’s Catalog - Keeping Track of Things!)
Last, but certainly not least, Jason Morgan, Technical Evangelist at Buoyant, covered Handling Dependencies with Flux. Kubernetes provides a simple way to apply configuration against a cluster but sometimes the order of operations matters. Using a tool like a service mesh requires that the control plane and proxy injector, a mutating webhook, be ready before you install your applications. Jason demos how to use Flux’s dependency manager to ensure that your apps get added to your mesh every time.
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!
