Weaveworks Delivers on GitOps Enterprise Promise
Weaveworks today announced that the Weave GitOps Enterprise platform for accelerating the delivery of cloud-native applications in Kubernetes environments is now generally available.
At the same time, the company has updated the enterprise edition of the platform to enable it to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters using templates, revamped its user interface and made it simpler to deploy services using a component profiles capability.
Steve George, Weaveworks COO, says the goal is to make it easier to not only deploy applications but also to provide a layer of abstraction that makes managing the overall Kubernetes environment simpler by, for example, making it easier to provision Kubernetes clusters and then deploy open source Prometheus monitoring software.
Weaveworks also formally revealed that Deutsche Telekom is using the Weaveworks platform to roll out a cloud-native application environment for deploying 5G wireless applications on Kubernetes clusters. Previously, the investment arm of the telecommunications carrier infused $32 million into Weaveworks.
GitOps, at its core, refers to the process of automating the provisioning and management of IT infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code and best practices typically associated with deploying applications. Now that infrastructure is managed with code, it’s becoming easier to converge the management of IT operations and application deployment. Kubernetes provides an ideal GitOps platform because it presents a standard set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable clusters to automatically pull code as required versus requiring an IT team to manually push code out to a platform.
That approach makes it simpler for IT operations to achieve continuous delivery of applications, a goal that has remained elusive despite the widespread deployment of continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms using automated pull requests, notes George.
Weaveworks created its platform using Flux, an open source tool that automatically ensures that the state of a cluster matches the configuration stored in a Git repository. It uses an operator in the cluster, dubbed Flagger, to trigger application deployments to Kubernetes. Flux monitors all image repositories, detects new images, triggers deployments and updates configurations accordingly. The company has also created Team Workspaces, a workflow application for tracking changes to Git-based deployments, in addition to making available a free edition of the platform for small development teams.
It’s not clear to what degree the proliferation of Kubernetes clusters in the enterprise will lead to the widespread adoption of GitOps best practices. However, as IT teams increasingly deploy fleets of Kubernetes clusters across an extended enterprise, there is a unique opportunity to centralize the management of those clusters via a standard set of APIs. In the longer term, those APIs will become the foundation on which a hybrid cloud computing environment can be implemented. GitOps platforms like Weaveworks Enterprise should then make it feasible to manage application deployments across what will inevitably become a highly distributed computing environment.
There may even come a day when organizations decide to retire the platforms that they currently use to deploy monolithic applications simply because, from a DevOps perspective, they can’t be as fully automated as a Kubernetes environment. Regardless of the motivation, however, it’s apparent GitOps and Kubernetes have a symbiotic relationship through which one is enabling the enterprise adoption of the other.