Flux is now a CNCF incubating project

[weaveworks]

We are proud to announce that the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee promoted Flux to Incubation status. This is testament to the dedication of a community that deeply believes in GitOps principles as the way to operate your applications and infrastructure, and scale more efficiently. It is also a testament to the maintainers and contributors whose skills and knowledge have led to building the most powerful GitOps tool in the ecosystem.

"Incubation is the ‘high bar’ for CNCF projects, representing serious production use and readiness, a healthy community, and a project that is here to stay,” said Alexis Richardson, Weaveworks CEO and former TOC chair, CNCF. “All those things are true of Flux, one of the most exciting projects today and something I feel very lucky to be associated with."

Flux was started at Weaveworks as an internal project to help us deploy services from Git. We were already using Git as the single source of truth, and we found out during an incident, that we could rebuild our system from Git in about an hour. Automating the Kubernetes part of this led to Flux, when we realized that what we had built for ourselves would be helpful to the Ops world at large. We started to define the GitOps principles and integrated Flux into our Weave Cloud product and then into our WKP product (and stay tuned for future products that will use Flux v2!).

If you’ve been using Flux v1, we thank you for all of the enthusiasm that we’ve heard from the growing community during these years. We’re also proud to see the excitement coming from people trying out Flux v2 and seeing its powerful improvements. Your feedback continues to show how Flux has been the driver of advancing GitOps, and it gives the maintainers and contributors the drive to build Flux v2 into the most powerful GitOps tool for the community.

So let’s celebrate!

In many ways, we’ve been celebrating Flux’s latest evolution for a while.

Our Incubation validation from the CNCF is one of many. We’ve been in Sandbox, continue to receive great support from the TOC, have fantastic sponsors backing us (Michelle Noorali and Lei Zhang), and in 2020 we received the highest recommendation from the CNCF user community in the publication of the CNCF Technology Radar for Continuous Delivery:

This recommendation was doubly exciting for us at Weaveworks because we have maintainers of both Flux and Helm in the company. It is a great validation to see only Flux and Helm in the coveted Adopt category.

At our two GitOps Days events in May and November 2020, many speakers shared their stories about leveraging the power of GitOps using Flux. We had speakers from Fidelity Investments, Under Armour, Mettle, Palo Alto Networks, Adobe, Control Plane, AWS, Microsoft, and more all sharing their amazing experiences with GitOps because of Flux.

Top thought leaders in our industry such as Kelsey Hightower, James Governor, Viktor Farcic, David Aronchick, and Maya Kaczorowski joined us or have spoken about Flux and GitOps because of what we’ve built at Weaveworks. We are honored and humbled by their company, plus stay tuned for the great line-up that we have planned for GitOps Days 2021!

We would not have our Flux success without our passionate community that continues to grow 3-4x across various metrics (clones, Slack engagement, mailing list, meetup membership, GH stars, Flux in-prod users list, and more). Flux v1 users are successfully migrating to Flux v2 everyday and new Flux v2 users have been spreading the word.

What’s so great about Flux v2 and what’s with all of these repos?

Flux v1 is a monolithic do-it-all operator and, because it’s a monolith the maintainers could only meet some of the community’s needs. Flux v2 separates the functionalities into specialized controllers, collectively called the GitOps Toolkit. Because of the new microservices architecture, you’ll see the various repos actively being developed. Eg. notification-controller, source-controller, helm-controller, and more. We’ve also moved Flagger into the Flux repo, which provides powerful Progressive Delivery.

Just to name a few examples, Flux v2 improvements and benefits include:

• Supporting multiple source Git repositories
• Operational insight through health checks, events and alerts
• Multi-tenancy capabilities, like applying each source repository with its own set of permissions
• Support for GH Actions, Tekton, all git providers, Helm, and more.

For a detailed list of Flux v2 features and improvement, please see our new migration FAQ.

What’s in store for 2021?

How is GitOps expanding? It brings cloud native to operations. The industry has made huge strides in cloud native application development - architecture, two-pizza teams, agile. What GitOps represents is the extension of GitOps from Dev into Ops. That is, cloud-native DevOps. Flux’s success with the community and in the CNCF shows this expansion of GitOps. Our vision is that Flux can be the center of a broad GitOps ecosystem and so expand the scope and value of automated operations way beyond just Kubernetes.

Our CNCF Incubation status comes at a great time as we’ve just announced feature parity between Flux v1 and v2. We’ve also outlined our development and migration plans as we get final features from alpha to beta, and soon to GA.

Visit fluxcd.io and click on Get Started. First timers can follow the guides and Flux v1 users can follow the Migration guides. Get ahead of the curve and start migrating to Flux v2 now! If you want professional help to use Flux, email enable@weave.works.

Join the Weave Online User Group to get alerts for these great upcoming talks that are focused on Flux v2 updates and migration walk-throughs!

16th March: Progressive Delivery Across Multiple Clusters and Cloud with Buoyant & Weaveworks

22nd March: Hands-On GitOps Patterns for Helm Users with Scott Rigby

25th of March: CNCF On-Demand Webinar: Flux is Incubating + The Road Ahead

30th March: Cloud Native Engineering with SRE and GitOps with Brice Fernandes

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