Kubecon + CloudNativeCon 2024: Flux CD tool solidified for growth
The Computer Weekly Developer Network team found itself in the city of lights this week for the Paris, France-located KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe conference.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) states its mission as a pledge to build sustainable ecosystems for cloud-native software.
The team notes that this month the graduated project FluxCD is receiving support from new dedicated companies committed to the ongoing maintenance and development of Flux GitOps tools and providing continuous delivery for applications and platforms. With additional support from CNCF, the project has now successfully transitioned to a stronger and broader community.
Flux CD is a Continuous Delivery (CD) tool designed to help keep Kubernetes clusters in sync with configuration sources such as Git repositories and automate configuration updates when available.
FluxCD was developed at Weaveworks which announced that it would cease commercial operations at the start of February. CNCF has worked with many FluxCD stakeholders so that end users and former customers can access long term sustainable development and support.
GitLab announced its continued support for Flux and working with partners in a recent blog post. In early 2023, GitLab integrated Flux with its agent for Kubernetes offering as the recommended GitOps solution.
“I am glad to see the continued support across the open source cloud native community for Flux as well as Weaveworks ensuring projects remain available throughout the community. In the immediate future, CNCF is planning to fund mentorships and security work. We encourage other organisations to get involved as there’s never a bad time to contribute to an open source project you depend on. Also, this is a great example of the strength and resilience of our community and we look forward to Flux’s continued evolution and growth,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF.
FluxCD ecosystem projects are expanding and enabling more open source capabilities and pathways for contributors to enter the space. With Weaveworks support, key projects have now migrated into the wider community such as the Flux-IaC tools that enable GitOps for infrastructure as code tools working alongside Kubernetes.
“After I announced the closure of Weave, I was overwhelmed by the offers of support from across the industry. People love FluxCD and the wonderful people and tools around it. Several vendors offered jobs, and end users asked what they could do to help,” said Alexis Richardson, CEO of Weaveworks. “Very quickly it became obvious that we could enable genuinely positive change. This was a terrific opportunity to help users and shift to a community model emphasizing equity, accessibility, and sustainability. That would be not only for core Flux but also for the projects that extend it; and where many more people could participate. That is our goal now.”
Bill Ledingham, CEO of Fairwinds has added commentary to say that Flux has had a major impact on the Kubernetes ecosystem and brought GitOps into mainstream usage.
“At OSO we have a collection of world class engineers who are committed to contributing, advising and supporting Flux Enterprise users under a simple, cost effective all-in-one subscription”, said Sion Smith CTO @ OSO.
Puja Abbassi, VP of product at Giant Swarm has said that his team chose Flux as the core of its GitOps experience for all enterprise customers as they believe that it’s the most cloud-native GitOps approach in the market. The team say they will continue providing support for Flux among its customers and are happy to contribute upstream based on the end user community’s production usage of the project.
