CNCF Advances Flux CD Platform for Kubernetes Environments
The Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) this week made the open source Flux continuous delivery platform for Kubernetes environments an incubation-level project.
Originally developed by Weaveworks, Flux has been a sandbox-level project advanced under the auspices of the CNCF since August 2019. With this promotion, Flux is one step away from officially graduating alongside other CNCF projects such as Kubernetes and Prometheus.
Cornelia Davis, CTO, Weaveworks, says this promotion is really a vote of confidence for a continuous delivery (CD) platform that will enable organizations that have embraced Kubernetes to more easily embrace GitOps best practices.
Most organizations today rely on continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms to implement DevOps practices based on the idea that code would be pushed from a CI platform to an integrated CD platform. The challenge is that CD platforms are trying to push code to unique target systems. As a result, very few organizations actually achieve continuous delivery.
However, with the rise of Kubernetes, those unique target systems now have a common layer of abstraction. Rather than pushing code from a CI system, it becomes possible for those systems to automatically pull code directly from a Git repository using a framework like Flux.
The core components of Flux are a GitOps toolkit that provides a set of runtime application programming interfaces (APIs) and controllers and an application release delivery tool dubbed Flagger. The current version of Flux, however, is in maintenance mode while the contributors work on the next release. The CNCF reports there are now 80 organizations using Flux in production environments.
Flux integrates with a wide range of tools used in Kubernetes environments, including Kustomize, Helm, Kyverno, Prometheus and Minio. There is also a software development kit (SDK) for creating additional Flux controllers that can be integrated with other CNCF projects.
Weaveworks itself recently picked up an additional $36.65 million in funding to advance development of Weave Kubernetes Platform (WKP) that employs Flux to monitor all image repositories, detects new images, triggers deployments and updates configurations accordingly. On top of that core platform, WKP adds Team Workspaces, a workflow application for tracking changes to Git-based deployments that can be used by multiple DevOps teams. Each workspace can also span multiple Kubernetes clusters to simplify the rollout of applications across a fleet of Kubernetes clusters.
It’s too early to say to what degree GitOps represents a new era in DevOps, or is simply another logical step forward once Kubernetes is more widely employed. In the meantime, it is clear that CD is about to finally become more automated at a time when the number of platforms application code might be deployed on continues to rapidly expand. Assuming, of course, all those platforms are running a distribution of Kubernetes, it should be possible to continuously update those platforms regardless of what CI tool is being employed to build an application.
