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Flux is a CNCF Graduated project

Flux becomes a graduated project within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Today is a day to celebrate our hard work as a community!
By dholbach |
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Flux is CNCF Graduated project

Flux has graduated

Today is a very exciting day for the Flux community! Flux is now a graduated project in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and joining the ranks of Kubernetes, Helm, Prometheus and others in this category.

Flux History

We all worked very hard to make this happen - it is another important milestone in the Flux success story. Started in July 2016, engineers at Weaveworks built the first version of Flux to guarantee predictable deployments internally. This was way before Kubernetes had won the Cloud Native market.

In the coming years at Weaveworks, the learnings with Flux helped to establish and refine the principles of GitOps. Flux was integrated ever more closely with Kubernetes, and later on Helm and Kustomize. It also grew a community and an ecosystem. In 2018, Flagger was born, a Flux companion that made progressive delivery a natural extension of GitOps.

When Weaveworks donated Flux and Flagger to the CNCF, we already saw large-scale adoption growing and cloud vendors making the Flux suite core of their offerings to provide GitOps functionality.

This was also the point where we decided to rewrite Flux from scratch, using modern tooling such as controller-runtime and as a set of targeted controllers, which made Flux development a lot more straight-forward. In the past weeks we archived Legacy Flux and are very close to making Flux v2 GA. Watch this space for the announcement!

“We created Flux as open source from the beginning, in order to work out in the open. It was very gratifying therefore, and far from inevitable, that a loyal and mutually supportive community grew around it. Making that happen takes a lot of empathy and patience from all involved – so, thank you everyone, for carrying Flux ever further.”

– Michael Bridgen, co-creator of Flux

Flux’s home: the CNCF

Today is a great time to look back at our time in the CNCF. We wouldn’t be where we are today without the services and help of people at the CNCF. It wasn’t just the great benefits and infrastructure we enjoy as a project, but also the careful guidance and collaboration of CNCF groups such as the TOC, TAG Security / TAG Contributor Experience and all the adjacent project communities which also live at the CNCF. We also would like to thank our TOC sponsor, Matt Farina, who helped us navigate this process and encouraged us to take Flux even further!

“I feel humbled and honored to be part of the Flux & Flagger team for the past five years. With the help of our community, we have come a long way since Flux inception and the start of the GitOps movement. Today, Flux is an established continuous delivery solution for Kubernetes, trusted by organisations around the world and backed by vendors like Amazon AWS, D2iQ, Microsoft Azure, VMware, Weaveworks and others that offer Flux to their users. The Flux team is very grateful to the cloud-native community and CNCF who supported us over the years and made Flux what it is today”

– Stefan Prodan, Flux maintainer and creator of Flagger

During the Graduation process, we particularly reflected on security and governance. We threat-modelled the Flux components, which resulted in documented security best practice. We will continue to educate our user community on how to use Flux securely. Today both Flux and Flagger are 100% compliant with the CLO monitor, which is the highest score amongst graduated CNCF projects. We streamlined our security processes, and have regular conversations with security professionals from CNCF tag-security. Soon we are going to undergo a second security audit for an external validation of all the great work we have done over the last few years.

We are incredibly proud of what we have achieved and what we have given to the wider ecosystem. GitOps is close to becoming the de-facto standard. Cloud vendors offer GitOps capabilities to their customers these days, a lot of this is based on Flux as a technology and the learnings we made until today. We are extremely pleased to have this huge ecosystem built on top of and around Flux, including recent Flux UIs!

Next up: Flux going GA

The 2.0.0 release of Flux is drawing near as well!

While Flux has been production ready for quite some time, we have an extremely strict backwards compatibility policy and take major versions very seriously.

The Flux community was working on a number of concurrent projects at the same time: qualifying for Graduation, refactoring the controllers to standardise the internal APIs, stabilizing the use of APIs of e.g. Helm and Git, integrating OCI artifacts and Cosign verification fully into Flux, and more. All of these workstreams were happening at the same time. To make it clear to everyone what a GA release for Flux would look like, we’ve updated our GA roadmap. There are many important details here for those following the 2.0.0 release, but one thing that is very important to us is further stabilizing Flux and its APIs so it will be even easier for new community members to contribute and build on top of Flux!

💖 Huge thank-you

You are all rock stars! 🤩 Continued thanks to everyone of our Flux community members who have, in ways small and large, contributed to the success of Flux!

If you want to celebrate with us or are now more curious about Flux, please join us at our Flux Graduation Ask-Us-Anything sessions:

We are looking forward to seeing you and getting to know you there!