1 Billion Flux Downloads Show GitOps Gaining Ground
Weaveworks today says container images of its open source Flux version control software have now been downloaded more than one billion times. Flux is at the core of Weaveworks’ GitOps platform.
In addition, the company claims that its enterprise customer base doubled in the first half of 2022, which led to a corresponding increase in revenue for the same period.
Weaveworks CEO Alexis Richardson says as more organizations deploy fleets of Kubernetes clusters, it’s clear GitOps is emerging as the preferred method for deploying cloud-native applications based on microservices.
GitOps, as a more prescriptive approach to implementing a set of DevOps best practices, enables IT teams to leverage Git repositories to continuously deliver applications using configurations integrated with code that programmatically provisions infrastructure.
When combined with Flux, that infrastructure-as-code (IaC) approach automatically ensures that the state of a Kubernetes cluster matches the configuration stored in a Git repository. It also monitors all image repositories, detects new images, triggers deployments and updates configurations. Weaveworks has further extended that capability using an operator, dubbed Flagger, to trigger application deployments to Kubernetes clusters.
Collectively, that platform enables configuration and security policies to be held in a Git repository alongside the code created to manage infrastructure. Any changes can be made, reviewed and then pushed through an automated pipeline that verifies, deploys and monitors every update.
In effect, Weaveworks is part of a growing chorus of DevOps platform providers that are making a case for separating continuous delivery from continuous integration. Historically, the CI and CD requirements have, at least in theory, been addressed via integrated CI/CD platforms. In practice, the number of organizations that have achieved CD is relatively small. Each platform on which applications are deployed has its own unique set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that make it challenging to automate application delivery.
Kubernetes, however, running on multiple platforms, presents an opportunity to invoke a common set of APIs to achieve that goal. The degree to which IT teams will manage CD and CI in a more loosely coupled fashion is now the subject of a fierce debate. Each IT organization will need to determine the degree to which they want to shift to GitOps processes as more Kubernetes clusters are deployed in production environments.
GitOps, of course, can be applied beyond Kubernetes clusters, but as organizations transition to building and deploying cloud-native applications, there is a significant amount of correlation between the adoption of Kubernetes and GitOps workflows. It’s not clear to what degree organizations are deliberately adopting GitOps. Some organizations are simply finding more efficient ways to deploy applications on Kubernetes clusters using the APIs provided only to discover they have adopted a new methodology for deploying applications.
Regardless of how the transition to GitOps occurs, however, the number of organizations that are adopting best practices for building and deploying applications that are based on DevOps principles should increase as more organizations deploy cloud-native applications. The challenge is finding a way to optimize those processes across IT environments made up of fleets of Kubernetes clusters.
