It’s a watershed moment in the evolution of cloud native: Argo and Flux, which let teams declaratively deploy and run applications and workflows on Kubernetes using GitOps, have left CNCF’s incubation phase. In graduating, the pair demonstrated advanced design and impressive security, project stability and mature governance and a rapid level of adoption.
Their graduation from the CNCF establishes GitOps as mainstream technology and further propels cloud native to maturity.
Argo and Flux landed in the CNCF Incubator in 2020 and 2019 respectively during which time adoption of Kubernetes was accelerating apace. By 2021 more than half of those participating in a CNCF survey told us they run Kubernetes – up by 67 percent on the previous year.
As Kubernetes accelerated, so did our work on GitOps: Argo became one of our most active projects, with 2,300 companies and 8,000 individuals participating. Further, Argo has seen a 250 percent jump in its use on production workloads since joining the CNCF incubator; Adobe, Capital One, Intuit, and Ticketmaster are among those now running Argo.
Flux is also in robust health: we saw a 400 percent increase in growth activity during its incubator phase. Users include giants such as Volvo, SAP, and RingCentral while Microsoft, Red Hat, and Weaveworks are among those confident to offer Flux as the basis for their GitOps customer services.
The momentum is clear. Question is – what’s taking GitOps mainstream and where do Argo and Flux fit?
As we become increasingly digital, the need for stable, reliable, and secure platforms grows. Interestingly, Google notes that 70 percent of outages are caused by changes in live systems and recommends a number of best practices teams can implement to reduce this number. DevOps has taken us a long way in our digital transformation using cloud native, equipping organizations with consistent and repeatable procedures to build and maintain systems. As a result, 47 percent are using DevOps according to a 2022 survey by GitLab.
GitOps takes the concepts behind DevOps and changes up a gear: it provides a means for organizations to describe declaratively infrastructure they are building and operating, to store that information centrally in git repositories, and to apply and approve changes using automated tools by implementing the declarative map and git repo.
This is important because it provides a pathway to stable, dependable, and predictable cloud native infrastructure. It serves as a single source of truth about the composition of infrastructure and its state; undocumented changes can be challenged and drift reconciled.
Centralized and automated tools in GitOps are train tracks along which changes can roll. Updates such as software patches can be planned and made as git commits. Because changes are git commits they can be verified, implemented, and applied repeatedly without affecting earlier changes.
Argo and Flux are proven and mature technologies capable of consolidating and extending GitOps inside the wider footprint of Kubernetes. Having a choice of two mature projects will allow teams to pick the most appropriate GitOps platform for their requirements or even combine them in interesting ways!
If you want to continue to evolve GitOps, join the GitOpsWorking Group in CNCF and consider attending GitOpsCon next year.