Project post originally published on the Flux blog by Daniel Holbach
It was KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2022 last week and if you weren’t able to attend, this post provides you with everything you need to know about Flux and GitOps that happened there. The schedule was packed with case studies, development updates and many new friendships formed at our booths and in the hallway track.
Monday
On Monday we kicked off the day for Flux with a Project Meeting. We are grateful we had this opportunity through the CNCF to offer a 4 hour event available to any interested community members. Stefan Prodan, Leigh Capili and Priyanka Ravi led various talks and provided a great and very diverse overview of what’s happening in Flux and adjacent tooling these days and how to best take advantage of it.
Thanks as well Vanessa Abankwah for pulling all the strings in the background!
The Cloud Native Telco Day was happening as well on Monday and Philippe Ensarguet, CTO at Orange Business, live-tweeted some of the learnings there. We are very pleased to know that the GitOps setup of Swisscom is based on Flux. Deutsche Telekom is continuing their voyage on Das Schiff together with Flux as well.
Tuesday – GitOpsCon
Who would have thought a couple of years ago that one day we would have an entire conference day just about GitOps – this year it was two simultaneous tracks no less. We want to thank the Open GitOps group for organising this and inviting great speakers from across all of the GitOps space!
Taken from the CNCF flickr account.
Here is our own small selection of favourites. If you want to see all the talks from GitOpsCon, take a look at the YouTube channel of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation – there are loads more.
- Crossing the Divide: How GitOps Brought AppDev & Platform Teams Together! – Priyanka “Pinky” Ravi, Weaveworks
- Michael Irwin on using Flux for multi-tenancy: Creating A Landlord for Multi-tenant K8s Using Flux, Gatekeeper, Helm, and Friends – Michael Irwin
- AppsFlyer talks about Flux at the core of their huge infra:
- Max’ talk about Flux for multi-cluster envs: Managing Thousands of Clusters and Their Workloads with Flux – Max Jonas Werner, D2iQ
- Environment promotion (Form3): Solving Environment Promotion with Flux – Sam Tavakoli & Adelina Simion, Form3
- Lightning Talks:
- Secret decryption: Lightning Talk: Hiding in Plain Sight – How Flux Decrypts Secrets – Somtochi Onyekwere, Weaveworks
- Progressive delivery: Lightning Talk: GitOps and Progressive Delivery with Flagger, Istio and Flux – Marco Amador, Anova
- GitOps, A Slightly Realistic Situation on Kubernetes with Flux – Laurent Grangeau, Google & Ludovic Piot, theGarageBandOfIT
Wednesday – Friday – KubeCon
Wednesday through Friday was the main event, with the big keynotes, talks on many different tracks and a big booth space. We are happy we had such a great team at the Flux booth because ours was massively frequented and our team gave a huge amount of demos, answered questions and were there to hang out with.
In addition to the physical booth in Valencia, we had a virtual booth as well, where Kingdon Barrett held our weekly Bug Scrub event and we gave a number of lightning talks as well.
Lightning talks at the virtual booth
First up was Sanskar Jaiswal, Software Engineer at Weaveworks, who recently became Flagger maintainer and contributed Gateway API support. Watch the demo here:
We were happy to have Rosemary Wang, Developer Advocate at HashiCorp, there who walked us through securing secrets in Flux by using Vault:
#flexyourflux
Another contributing factor to the amount of people coming to our booth was the #flexyourflux campaign, where you could
- Get a nice “flex your flux” t-shirt for answering a couple of questions about Flux
- Win an opportunity to have a 1-on-1 1h long meeting with Stefan Prodan, Flux core maintainer
The t-shirts were only available in person, but the meeting with Stefan you can still win, simply enter by filling out https://bit.ly/flexyourflux. We will draw the winners live at GitOps Days (see below). Good luck to all participants!
Talks you might have missed
Getting Started with Flux and GitOps
Tiffany Wang from Weaveworks and Joaquin Rodriguez led through a 1.5h hands-on tutorial called “ Intro to Kubernetes, GitOps and Observability”. The idea was to offer newcomers a quick way to experience Kubernetes and its natural evolutionary developments: GitOps and Observability. Attendees were able to use and experience the benefits of Kubernetes that impact reliability, velocity, security, and more. The session covered key concepts and practices, as well as offer attendees a way to experience the commands in real-time. The tutorial covers: kubectl, K9s, Metrics (Prometheus), Dashboards (Grafana), Logging (Fluent Bit), GitOps (Flux).
The feedback we heard from people on the ground was that they had a blast. If you missed it: good news – it’ll be happening at GitOps Days as well!
The Flux Deep Dive
Stefan Prodan delivered the Flux Deep Dive session – this time focused on security aspects.
There was a lot to be learnt and since security has been such a big focus for the entire team since the rewrite of Flux, also a lot to catch up on.
Stefan will give his talk at GitOps Days too (see below).
Flux Virtual Office Hours
Flux Maintainers Paulo Gomes & Kingdon Barrett hosted the Flux Virtual Office Hours where they covered the latest Flux features, what’s coming soon, and an intro to debugging the controllers for new contributors. Check out the replay here:https://www.youtube.com/embed/BrYgx4cB7p4
What’s more
Obviously the hallway track is one of the key events at KubeCon. It’s where you find new friends, learn and make new plans with other community members. There was a lot of this at the booth, at lunch and at the evening events.
In addition to that, many new users and community members find their way to Slack, our Twitter and LinkedIn group. We are also especially pleased that some new adopters added themselves to our website – remember that’s one of the safest ways to make Flux maintainers happy. 🥰
We expect that more talk videos are going to get to us in the next days and we will make sure to mention them all on our resources page and in our monthly updates.
Outlook: GitOps Days
If you had a FOMO experience over the last week, we are happy to let you know that GitOps Days are coming up! A free, two days event with lots of great talks, a lot of fun and lots to catch up with in case you missed seeing talks at KubeCon.
This is THE event for your GitOps Journey! Getting started? Taking GitOps to the next level? We’ll cover all of the steps for your success!
Come hear from speakers like Taylor Dolezal (CNCF), Anaïs Urlichs (Aqua Security, CNCF Ambassador), Viktor Farcic (Upbound/Crossplane), Mae Large (VMware), Rosemary Wang (HashiCorp), Jason Morgan (Buoyant/Linkerd), and so many more!
Big Thank You
This wouldn’t have been possible without the support of many many people.
People speaking: Stefan Prodan, Somtochi Onyekwere, Max Jonas Werner, Priyanka Ravi, Tiffany Wang, Paulo Gomes, Scott Rigby, Kingdon Barrett, Sanskar Jaiswal and others.
Folks organising, writing, fact-checking and supporting the booth: Vanessa Abankwah, Stacey Potter, Tamao Nakahara, Juozas Gaigalas and others.
And of course many people from adjacent communities, adopter companies and of course the CNCF.
Sorry if we missed to mention anyone.
And in closing out, here is a short selection of official KubeCon photos, all around Flux and GitOps:
