Close the Cloud-Native Skills Gap and Use Automation to Boost Developer Productivity with Weave GitOps Release 2023.04
The 2023.04 release of Weave GitOps Enterprise introduces Pipelines, GitOps Templates and GitOps Sets and focuses on improving developer experience and boosting developer productivity when building, deploying, and operating applications on Kubernetes.
Today we are announcing the 2023.04 release of Weave GitOps Enterprise, the leading GitOps Automation platform for Kubernetes. The newly released features Pipelines, GitOps Templates and GitOps Sets, focus on improving developer experience and boosting developer productivity when building, deploying, and operating applications on Kubernetes. The 2023.04 release equips platform teams with the tools and controls to empower development teams to roll-out and manage their own applications with a high-degree of trust, verification, cost management, and more.
Previous releases of Weave GitOps Enterprise laid the foundation for platform teams to build self-service platforms on top of Kubernetes; for example GitOps Run, VS Code Extension, Terraform Controller, multitenancy, and more. Today’s release furthers developer and platform team efficiency and effectiveness, and reduces the complexity and friction slowing down cloud native teams.
In addition we are announcing our latest product Weave GitOps Assured, the most comprehensive subscription from the creators of FluxCD for open source GitOps and Continuous Delivery, featuring advanced policies, centralized governance and support. FluxCD, a graduated CNCF project and Flagger empower you to deploy and operate Kubernetes applications on premise, and on any managed Kubernetes provider or public cloud. Unleash the flexibility of OSS with bitstream assurance (CVE, hotfixes) and enterprise support from Weaveworks, the cloud native experts.
Fully automated deployment pipelines
Boost developer productivity and provide an exceptional experience when promoting applications with fully automated release pipelines.
What are Pipelines?
The Pipelines feature enables teams to increase the velocity, stability, and security of software systems through the use of automated, hands-off deployment pipelines. Developers define a release pipeline for a given application as a custom resource. The pipeline can comprise any number of environments - such as Development, Staging, and Production - through which an application is expected to be deployed.
Developers can push a change to their application in their dev environment, and watch the update roll out across staging and production environments all from a PR (or an external process like Jenkins), with Weave GitOps Enterprise orchestrating everything. Designed with flexibility in mind, this feature can be easily integrated with your existing CI setup for example CircleCI, Jenkins or GitHub Actions. The Ops team can enforce guardrails that automate the rollback of changes in case of any failures across the pipeline.
This feature offers numerous benefits to developers:
- Reduce toil and errors when setting up a new pipeline or reproducing previous pipelines through YAML constructs
- Save time and overhead with automated code rollout from one environment to another, with minimal intervention from the Ops team
- One UI to observe code progression and track application versions through different environments
- Streamline code deployment from one environment to another and minimize friction between Developers and Ops teams
- Easily define which Helm charts are part of the environments they create to save massive time through automated package management.
Boost developer productivity with GitOps Templates
Platform teams leverage GitOps Templates to create autonomous workflows for developers, improve the developer experience and reduce toil and cognitive load. This results in faster time to market and higher operational reliability for the organization.
What are GitOps Templates?
GitOps Templates provide an easily reproducible format to define and deploy resources such as ClusterAPI, Flux Primitives, Kubernetes and others, so developers can easily build and deploy code while having to write little or no YAML. Templates put an end to the error-prone and time-consuming practice of manually provisioning infrastructure resources or waiting for those resources to be provisioned by others, leading to an increased focus on high-value developer effort.
Templates can be used to define services, create pipelines, build clusters on demand, and more, all while enforcing standardization and best practices. Templates empower platform teams to set guardrails and golden paths for developers that remove the risk and uncertainty for dev teams owning the infrastructure they need, without taking precious time away from building code.
Templates can include required defaults such as pipeline services, policy-as-code configurations, and progressive delivery triggers - and can even
specify things such as worker node configurations to help manage cloud costs.
Streamlining environment creation with GitOps Sets
Automate the creation of scalable Kubernetes environments down to cluster-specific configurations to reduce manual effort and human error, and remove the complexity and toil sapping operational efficiency.
What are GitOps Sets?
GitOpsSets enable Platform Operators to have a single resource definition for an application for multiple environments and a fleet of clusters. A single definition can be used to generate the environment and cluster-specific configuration. GitOpsSets will create all the objects and Flux primitives that are required to successfully deploy an application. An operation that previously required the editing of hundreds of files can be done now with a single command thanks to GitOps Sets automation, vastly streamlining and standardizing workflows.
Some of the developer benefits include:
- Reduces errors and speeds up deployment frequency and lead time by giving developers the ability to quickly review code changes in a short-lived preview environment.
- Streamlines and shortens the process of getting changes into environments triggered through a natural pull request-based developer flow.
- See the resources created from GitOpsSets and the status for each of those resources centrally in the Weave GitOps GUI.
- Simplifies the arduous and complex process of defining repetitive, individual parameters and variables by abstracting them to a single definition, making it fast and easy to configure and deploy multiple environments.
- Automates deployments to many sets of targets from a single abstraction, saving teams time and removing errors.
Weave GitOps Assured
Weave GitOps Assured covers all aspects of continuous application delivery (CD) and cluster management for Kubernetes. We have bundled FluxCD and Flagger into an assured subscription that gives you bitstream assurance (CVE, hotfixes) without the need to purchase commercial software licenses.
Weave GitOps Assured extends FluxCD with an infrastructure controller to manage Terraform resources, and Weave Policy agent to assure policy control. This allows application teams to roll out, secure and manage their own applications. Self-service workflows are not only lowering DevOps friction but increase quality of life and quality of code! A GUI allows teams to observe production clusters, deployments and receive alerts and notifications. Teams can choose from a catalog of curated and supported templates, tools and plugins such as GitOps tools for Visual Studio Code.
Watch the recap of our launch webinar. We demo the 2023.04 release features that enable platform engineers to abstract away deployment complexity and allow autonomous and safe code development for application teams.
Optimizing Developer Productivity & Experience with Self Service - Pipelines, Templates & Sets
Watch the Weave GitOps launch webinar recap and see the 2023.04 release features in action.
