GitOps Days 2022 recap: major clouds and vendors offering GitOps with Flux
The GitOps community has been and is growing rapidly. Let's catch up with AWS, Microsoft, RedHat, VMware and D2iQ and how they have embedded Flux in their products. Exciting demos await!
This blog post has been authored by Daniel Holbach and Stacey Potter.
The team around GitOps Days came together back in the middle of 2020 with the mission to educate the world about the leaps that GitOps had made as a methodology and tool chain. A secondary objective of the group was to create a community for GitOps maintainers, engineers, practitioners and users and brighten everyone's day during the first wave of lockdowns.
The second edition of GitOps Days was called “GitOps One-Stop Shop Event” where the focus was how Amazon, D2iQ, Microsoft, Red Hat, VMware and Weaveworks all developed products and services offering GitOps capabilities. This was largely due to the new iteration of Flux having been built in an incredibly extensible fashion. The Flux team is very proud of the developments and about the collaboration with these vendors.
In the 2022 edition of GitOps Days in June it was time to check in with the GitOps One Stop Shop vendors again and see where they had taken their offerings. It was particularly exciting to see the product demos that gave an extensive overview of how you could benefit from the features.
Let’s dive into what the presenters had to show off - it was a lot!
GitOps with Weave GitOps
First up was James Wilson, Director of Product Management at Weaveworks. He detailed the breadth of Weave GitOps, which comes with GitOps dashboard, cluster management, compliance and CI violation checks. Weave GitOps is built on extending Flux. We also got a sneak peek on what’s coming soon: a deep focus on Developer Experience, integration of the terraform controller, progressive delivery, team workspaces and fleet management.
GitOps in Microsoft Azure with Flux
It was great to have Chris Sanders, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft and Jonathan Innis, Software Engineer II at Microsoft back again. Azure has been relying on Flux for a long time already: implementing Legacy Flux in the past already, all Arc services now use the latest version of Flux. What’s great about this tight integration is that you get to manage the cluster lifecycle through the API, the CLIs, the portal, through powershell, terraform and others. And from there on all information from the Flux controllers are available to you in all parts of the tooling. This gives you more flexibility and control over the cluster lifecycle. Jonathan took us through the setup procedure and showed off some of the features of the Azure Portal.
GitOps with Amazon EKS Anywhere
Next up were Chandler Hoisington, General Manager for Kubernetes and Joey Wang, Software Engineer, both at Amazon Web Services, who walked us through the endless opportunities you can implement GitOps with Flux using AWS EKS Anywhere. For example GitOps makes it easy and gives you ample flexibility to manage cluster and application lifecycles across a hybrid cloud set up (on premise and EKS). Defining all of your cluster setup declaratively will allow you to easily test locally and to move individual resources like the control or data plane seamlessly to on-prem, EKS, edge or different regions depending on your immediate business needs.
GitOps with VMware Tanzu Application Platform
Leigh Capili, Staff Developer Advocate at VMware Tanzu, also stopped by to share a bit about how Tanzu Application Platform is using components of Flux. “Flux is so well factored & well designed that it just makes sense for us to include parts of Flux directly in our product.” says Leigh Capili. Using Tanzu Community Edition and App Toolkit (which includes Flux’s Source Controller among other tools), Leigh demonstrates how easy it is to create an end-to-end workflow that focuses on a high quality developer experience.
How D2iQ Operates Flux
Deepak Goel, CTO at D2iQ joined to set the stage on where D2iQ is with their GitOps adoption workflow in their product line as well as the why. Kubernetes offers a lot of flexibility, but for newcomers it adds a lot of complexity as well. At D2iQ they strongly believe that implementing GitOps workflow is a great way to handle that complexity; not to mention the added benefits like repeatability and auditability. Deepak states the reason D2iQ adopted Flux is because of the way Flux integrates into the larger system. Flux takes Kubernetes native concepts into consideration, such as RBAC and multi-tenancy, namespace, et al, which makes Flux a really lightweight application to provide a GitOps workflow experience. Max Jonas Werner, Senior Software Engineer at D2iQ, then dives into D2iQs specific adoption of Flux into their family of products for both cluster lifecycle and application lifecycle management, and demonstrates deployments using D2iQ’s DKP.
GitOps with Flux on OpenShift
Andrew Block, Distinguished Architect at Red Hat and contributor to several open source projects including Helm, gives us an overview of how you can use GitOps with Flux on OpenShift. Andrew shares the business drivers for GitOps automation, an overview of OpenShift, and how Flux is a perfect match for GitOps on OpenShift. Andrew then demos deploying Flux through the OperatorHub, how platform teams can manage the deployment of namespaces on a kubernetes environment, how isolating different workloads within different namespaces enables better security, deploys an application to multiple namespaces, and finally how application & SRE teams can monitor the current state of the Flux platform as well as utilizing Policy Enforcement with either Gatekeeper or Kyverno.
In conclusion, these cloud providers and vendors shine a spotlight on how Flux is being put to work in the enterprise today. It is super exciting to see that the Flux project has reached a level of maturity where Weaveworks, Microsoft, AWS, VMware, and D2iQ have chosen to integrate Flux as their trusted solution to offer GitOps to their customers. If you are curious to get started, you can download Weave GitOps Core which is powered by Flux and try it yourself!
Next Steps
We’ll be publishing more blog posts along with videos from the event to our GitOps Days 2022 Playlist, so stay tuned for more as they become available. And don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel!
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