Posted on March 11, 2021

The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has voted to promote Flux from the CNCF Sandbox to an incubating project. Since Flux entered the CNCF Sandbox in August 2019, it has defined open governance and security reporting processes, added seven new maintainers from multiple organizations, and grown its use in production to more than 80 organizations. 

The Flux project provides a complete Continuous Delivery (CD) platform on top of Kubernetes, supporting standard practices and tooling in the ecosystem. The project integrates with Kustomize, Helm, Kyverno, Prometheus, Minio, and others. It also has an SDK for creating additional Flux controllers intended to integrate easily with other CNCF projects.

Flux has increased its end user base by 2.75x since joining the CNCF Sandbox and expanded its community by 2x to 4x, including Slack users, mailing list subscribers, and contributors. It is used by more than 80 organizations in production, including Babylon Health, Fidelity Investments, MyFitnessPal, Starbucks, and many more. The CNCF End User Community included Flux in the Adopt category of its Technology Radar on Continuous Delivery – the only other technology in the Adopt category other than Helm. 

“Flux was the project that gave rise to ‘GitOps,’ which helps teams manage the complexity of operating Kubernetes, and has potential to expand well beyond,” said Michael Bridgen, Flux creator and project maintainer. “We’re excited to move into incubation as we develop that potential and build out the GitOps Toolkit and Flux version 2.”

Main Flux Components:

Notable Milestones:

The Flux project reached 1.0 in August 2017, and since 2019 releases have been made on a regular cadence to improve stability and add new features. The team is now working on Flux v2, which builds on the success of v1 to provide a set of projects to create a comprehensive GitOps solution. Beyond the capabilities of v1, it will sync git repositories to local or remote clusters, automate updates, be Kubernetes-native, and cover Progressive Delivery. It will soon be generally available, with a comprehensive feature roadmap, and the team will support the community through migration. 

“The Flux project has really been able to develop its community since entering the CNCF Sandbox,” said Daniel Holbach, Flux Community Maintainer. “The project has matured in many ways, and we are looking forward to an exciting new phase as an incubating project and with Flux v2.”

“GitOps started with the simple idea of using Git as the source of truth for declarative infrastructure to evolve to an ecosystem of tools that improves the developer experience of application delivery with Kubernetes,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “As more organizations adopt cloud native software at scale, the adoption of GitOps tools like Flux will naturally follow, and we look forward to cultivating their community within CNCF.”

As a CNCF-hosted project, joining incubating technologies Argo, Buildpacks, CloudEvents, CNI, Contour, Cortex, CRI-O, Dragonfly, Falco, gRPC, KubeEdge, Linkerd, NATS, Notary, OpenTracing, Operator Framework, Rook, SPIFFE, SPIRE, and Thanos, Flux is part of a neutral foundation aligned with its technical interests, as well as the larger Linux Foundation, which provides governance, marketing support, and community outreach. For more information on maturity requirements for each level, please visit the CNCF Graduation Criteria.

To learn more: