Best of 2024: Civo Acquires Kubefirst to Advance GitOps in Kubernetes Environments
Civo, a cloud services provider, has acquired the open source Kubefirst project as part of an effort to provide ongoing support for a framework for implementing GitOps best practices for deploying cloud-native applications on Kubernetes clusters.
Kubefirst was originally developed by Kubeshop, an organization devoted to creating an ecosystem around open source tools for Kubernetes environments that it builds. It is based on the open source Argo continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform originally developed by Intuit and Atlantis, a framework for automating pull requests for the open source Terraform infrastructure-as-a-code (IaC) tool.
Civo CEO Mark Boost said there are no plans to change the licensing terms under which Kubeshop is offered, and the maintainers of Kubeshop will continue to operate independently of Civo. Kubeshop, however, will be more tightly integrated with the Kubernetes services provided by Civo, he added.
The overall goal is to make it simpler for platform engineering teams to centralize the management of GitOps workflows, noted Boost.
It’s not clear how many organizations are formally adopting GitOps as a methodology for converging the management of the code used to provision IT infrastructure with the software artifacts that already reside in a Git repository. Many organizations may be routinely managing all their artifacts via a common Git repository without any type of framework.
However, it’s clear that, as more Kubernetes clusters are deployed in production environments, the need for tools to automate provisioning becomes more pronounced. While arguably the most powerful IT platform to find its way into production environments in recent memory, the level of expertise needed to manage Kubernetes continues to exceed the available supply of IT professionals who have the skills required. Frameworks such as Kubefirst should make it simpler to manage Kubernetes clusters within the context of an existing GitOps workflow based on the same Argo CI/CD platform being used to manage application development and deployment.
That approach provides the added benefit of making it simpler for IT teams to switch cloud service providers as needed based on the total cost of building and deploying various classes of cloud-native applications, noted Boost. In fact, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, more IT teams are re-evaluating where applications are running as they better understand the true cost of running them on one cloud service versus another, he added.
The level of cloud computing maturity tends to vary widely from one organization to another, but as IT teams gain more experience, they realize that most of the services they primarily use fall within a fairly narrow range of classes of virtual machines. The differences between one cloud service provider and another is relatively limited, so, in effect, cloud services are becoming more commoditized. Civo is betting that as that process continues, more organizations will consider alternative cloud service providers. In fact, many more will soon be working with multiple cloud service providers in much the same way they previously worked with providers of data center hosting services, he added.
In the meantime, however, as more cloud-native applications are built and deployed, the need to streamline the management of the underlying infrastructure that software depends on is only going to become that much more urgent.
