Exploring Flux CD In-Depth

[weaveworks]

Overview

Flux's journey from an internal Weaveworks project to a CNCF Sandbox project in 2019 and later a Graduated-Status project in 2022 has been remarkable. Its exponential growth and adoption by the community have been phenomenal, with its user base witnessing a 2x to 5x annual increase and an impressive record of over 1 billion container image pulls in 2022 alone. This impressive trajectory has made Flux a preferred choice for numerous enterprise companies, including industry giants like SAP, Volvo Cars, and Axel Springer.

Today we are excited to celebrate the general availability of Flux v2. This means Flux APIs are now considered stable and can be used confidently in production environments. They offer backward compatibility, ensuring that existing implementations will continue functioning as expected. Flux encompasses various APIs, but not all have attained GA status yet.

Flux v2.0.0 also adds horizontal scaling and sharding capabilities to Flux controllers. The Git bootstrap capabilities provided by the Flux CLI and by Flux Terraform Provider are now considered stable and production ready. For more details, please visit the latest blog post on fluxcd.io.

Flux CD’s capabilities encompass a wide range of cutting-edge features, empowering teams to deploy applications reliably through Progressive Delivery across multiple clusters and cloud environments. It ensures secure collaboration with isolating multi-tenancy, while bolstering enterprise-grade security through policy as code integration. Native support for Kustomize, Helm, and HashiCorp Vault further enhances its versatility and appeal.

Why Flux?

Flux, having achieved graduation within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, stands as a trusted GitOps tool embraced by prominent companies like Microsoft, AWS, GitLab, D2iQ, and others for delivering GitOps solutions to their customers. Its General Availability (GA) seamlessly integrates with Kubernetes Workload Identity for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, enabling passwordless authentication to OCI sources such as container images, OCI artifacts, and Helm charts.

Flux enables streamlined GitOps continuous delivery for Kubernetes clusters, automating the synchronization between your Git repository and cluster state. By maintaining a single source of truth in the Git repository, Flux ensures consistent and auditable cluster configurations. Its reliability, canary deployments, and rollback capabilities make it a preferred choice for enterprise companies seeking efficient, secure, and scalable Kubernetes management, while its seamless integration into key Kubernetes ecosystems enhances its appeal as a powerful and versatile tool for modern software delivery.

"At ORTEC for Communications, Flux has been an essential part of our DevOps journey and the ability to do more with less. Together with Kubernetes ecosystem tools, Flux is an essential part of providing our teams with end-to-end ownership, autonomy, and an evolved lifecycle. All of these offerings through Flux's capabilities, such as automation, security, and scalability, make DevOps a reality. We congratulate the Flux project for this major milestone!." - Mathijs Hoogland, Senior DevOps Engineer, ORTEC for Communications

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