Member post originally published on Weaveworks blog by Alexis Richardson
Explore the latest insights from the CNCF GitOps microsurvey and uncover how GitOps is set to dominate the cloud-native landscape, with overwhelming adoption rates forecasted in the next two years.
Wow! The CNCF GitOps micro survey was released and a whopping 100% of all survey respondents stated they will be embracing the methodology in the next 6 months to 2 years – with ⅔ in the next year. This is tremendous progress since we introduced the term GitOps (see full story) and signals a sea change in the cloud-native application paradigm. A new developer platform culture is emerging where every developer will be empowered with AI and GitOps, delivering automated operations and compliance. No more error-prone pipelines and manual operations. A not so far future for most organizations willing to make the change.
For years Flux CD and ArgoCD have been leading the way for GitOps and are undoubtedly the two most popular tools today. One major difference is the ecosystem that emerged for Flux CD – measured by the number of integrations, it represents the largest ecosystem for GitOps today. A sample of these are shown below.
Flux CD Ecosystem = Flux CD + Embedded Users + Extensions
Another really interesting aspect of Flux CD is that people can use it without knowing because it is embedded in another tool. GitLab has integrated Flux as the standard built-in GitOps tool and so have AKS and Azure Arc, Tanzu and EKS Anywhere.
And that’s just the start, Flux CD also has integrations for Terraform, OCI, cosign, Helm, Kubernetes CAPI (weave), OPA, Kyverno, OCM, Pulumi, Crossplane, and of course Argo CD too (if you don’t know – have a look at our Flamingo project)!
Take, for example, our newest integration, the Flux CD plugin for Backstage, which was just the inaugural launch partner for the newly released Backstage Marketplace. It enhances the developer experience through GitOps automation. Understanding and viewing Flux CD resources, enriching deployment visibility, and simplifying the DevOps experience for application and platform teams are just some of the benefits gained. We expect a rapid adoption by the Backstage community over the next few months.
Let’s crunch the data:
Out of the CNCF microsurvey respondents, we have three popular choices emerging: Argo CD, Terraform, and Flux CD.
However, if we add tools that embed Flux CD to the Flux data; and secondly, if we aggregate Flux ecosystem operators like Helm Operator and Terraform-Flux (in red), we see a dramatic change:
Let’s be very clear: this is just one sample. The big picture is that GitOps is mainstream!
Weaveworks Community Impact Recognised with New CNCF Award
Weaveworks leadership in the CNCF was celebrated this week at Kubecon with the “Small but Mighty” award. An award that recognizes an organization in the community with the largest impact. CNCF is made up of hundreds of thousands of individuals and organizations, each providing valuable contributions, but this award is presented to an organization punching above its weight.
Takeaway – GitOps is the Mainstream Standard in 2023
The CNCF’s micro survey confirms:
- 100% of respondents will embrace GitOps in 6 months to 2 years
- 60% have been using GitOps seriously for over a year
- 31% started using GitOps to operate cloud-native applications and Kubernetes environments during the past 12 months
As the GitOps leader, Weaveworks offers a complete suite of tools from small-scale application support up to platform delivery at fleet scale. Weave GitOps Assured ensures your Kubernetes workloads with a comprehensive subscription featuring Flux CD, Flagger, Terraform controllers, Policy agents, and various plugins. It’s the perfect balance between open source and community-fueled innovation combined with enterprise support and SLAs.
Our Enterprise subscription accelerates application and platform teams with fully automated delivery pipelines, templates for self-service workflows. and a security-first design. Of course, we support multi, hybrid and the edge which was stated as the main reason for organizations adopting GitOps today.
If you’re interested in using Flux CD, our commercial offerings or you’re already a Flux CD user and would like to be supported by a team actively involved in its development, contact us today.