Highlights of KubeCon and the GitOps One Stop Shop
If meeting and work commitments kept you away from some of the recent virtual and in person events on Kubernetes and GitOps. We have a quick rundown of the recent KubeCon and GitOps One Stop Shop events, curated from a GitOps perspective.
Two major events in the GitOps calendar just took place within a month of each other - KubeCon NA 2021 and the GitOps One Stop Shop. Here are our highlights.
KubeCon North America 2021 was notable from the outset for the fact that it was a real, in-person event. After close to two years of attending events virtually, it was great to get together in person once again.
Taking place at the Los Angeles Convention Center from Wednesday 13 October to Friday 15, it ran alongside a number of co-hosted events including GitOpsCon, which we covered here. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t some great GitOps-related sessions presented as part of the main KubeCon event.
Throughout the event, we showed our support for Black Girls Code, a non-profit dedicated to boosting inclusivity in the tech industry and creating opportunities for promising young women of color. To raise awareness of this important cause, we teamed up with Ambassador Labs, Jetstack, Civo, Codefresh and Buoyant, with each of us donating $2 for every visitor to attend our virtual booths.
An introduction to Helm and more
On the first day, Weaveworks’ Scott Rigby joined Mattermost’s Carlos Panato and Red Hat’s Karena Angell and Paul Czarkowski to provide an entertaining lowdown on Helm and its burgeoning ecosystem. Together, they covered some of the key Helm tools and how they can be used to streamline workflows and improve CI automation, taking in supply chain security, GitHub actions, YAML validation and more.
Later that same day, Weaveworks engineer Kingdon Barrett ran a session on using Jenkins as part of a GitOps workflow, showing how to deploy Jenkins declaratively with Flux's Helm Controller, how to build an app repo with Jenkins for deployment with Flux, how to test a Helm chart with Helm Test using Flux's Flagger, and how to deploy new releases automatically with Flux’s Image Automation Controller and Helm controller.
There was more GitOps in the final panel discussion of the day, when Leonardo Murillo Joined a panel that also included former Weaveworks CTO Cornelia Davis, to talk about OpenGitOps and the GitOps Working Group.
The roadmap for Flux
The following day, Hidde Beydals and Michael Bridgen, both Weaveworks engineers and maintainers of Flux, the engine of Weave GitOps, got together to provide a demonstration of the latest version, explaining the current status of the software and its path to GA status. Already in use in production, Flux now has first-class support for popular technologies like Kustomize, Helm, Prometheus, SOPS, GitHub, and GitLab, and it provides extension points in all areas to integrate with other technologies and platforms – much like Kubernetes itself. We can expect further announcements on GA status in the weeks to come.
The GitOps One Stop Shop
So that was KubeCon. But just a week later, key members of the Weaveworks team got together with delegates from Microsoft, Amazon and VMWare (among others) for a day of GitOps-focused talks at the GitOps One Stop Shop. A GitOps Days community special, the event looked specifically at how Flux is being put to work in the enterprise today. In doing so, it shone a spotlight on a series of GitOps and Kubernetes-related products, including our own Weave GitOps, Amazon’s EKS Anywhere and Microsoft’s Azure Arc Kubernetes. Alongside a team of Weaveworks engineers, the speakers included Chandler Hoisington, Kubernetes General Manager at Amazon Web Services, Jason Hansen, Principal Program Manager for Azure Arc at Microsoft and Ben Hale, a Senior Staff Engineer at VMWare.
Offering more than five hours worth of sessions, you can watch recordings of the whole day here.
