Weave GitOps Core: Continuous declarative delivery
Weave GitOps Core is a free, open source, opinionated GitOps product with a great developer experience. It is powered by Flux. Flux is a battle-tested and CNCF owned project, one of the first project recommended for adoption. Weave GitOps Core simplifies Flux by provisioning a custom cluster with two commands. Learn more on the blog
GitOps Days 2021 is already rolling. You can watch the livestream here. However, if you are reading this now it is because you heard our CTO, Cornelia Davis, announce the early release of our newest product Weave GitOps Core. That’s right, we just soft-launched the first ever GitOps product. Weave GitOps Core is a free, open source, opinionated GitOps product with a great developer experience. But before we jump into what Weave GitOps does, let me explain where this comes from and why it makes sense for Weaveworks to launch a product.
Early release: Reducing the developer experience gap
If you haven’t heard about the developer experience (DX) gap, the folks at Redmonk have written extensively about it. This is especially akin to Kubernetes where the DX of setting up the platform itself is rough at best. We want everyone to be able to bootstrap a Kubernetes cluster and deploy applications fast, and do so all from within Git. Yes, you heard right, from Git. Weave GitOps Core will deploy the application, any application, any configuration to any Kubernetes running in any environment.
Weave GitOps is powered by Flux. Flux is a battle-tested and CNCF owned project. It’s in fact the first project recommended for adoption. It simplifies Flux by provisioning a custom cluster with two commands. Such cluster has the main Kubernetes components already installed.It’s also GitOps enabled, meaning a reconciliation loop between the cluster (Running state) and the Git repos where all code is hosted (Declared state) is up and running too. Weave GitOps Core will automatically monitor specific events in repos, branches and folders to compare and detect drift. Drift detection will trigger a Pull Request immediately. The difference between Declared and Actual state can only be in the former since the system is immutable.
Immutable progress
That’s the basic setup. That’s what you get with two commands. But we all know app delivery is not that simple. Weave GitOps Core convention over configuration is here to save your day. Day two app operations will see your team of devs constantly pushing code to git. Weave GitOps will deliver that value progressively for your team. It can monitor new image builds to deploy them to a dev environment and listen to a merge event in the production branch that will only happen once the applied changes in dev are merged in production through a Pull Request (a Merge Request in GitLab). Reconciliation between the environments running in Kubernetes and the declared workloads is taken care of by Weave GitOps Core.
Observability is thus workload-centric since Weave GitOps Core will automatically monitor any drift. App operations can be handled without leaving Git allowing your teams to manage complex workflows from within their natural environment. This is the way we propose to achieve progressive delivery in a developer centric way. This is the first step in a long journey to GitOps maturity we hope you join. If you haven’t seen the GitOps Maturity Model introduced by Paul Fremantle and Tiffany Wang during GitOps Days, download the whitepaper for an extended read.
Weave GitOps Core next steps:
In its first stages, Weave GitOps Core wants to solve the application delivery problem in Kubernetes. Spinning up a custom Kubernetes cluster to test and eventually deploy an application is not simple. Even less so for developers. Weave GitOps Core early release allows you to spin up a cluster with your application running in it from Git.
If you want to learn more, why not join us next week in the upcoming webinar the GitOps User group is running? Download Weave GitOps Core now and let us know your thoughts then.
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