Announcing Flux 2.0 GA

Flux 2.0 and General Availability!

On July 5, 2023, Flux reached a major landmark with Flux 2.0 and the general availability of its GitOps components! Flux has continued to grow during its incredible journey. Its early iteration was built at Weaveworks for their own needs and for a previous SaaS product built on Flux. Flux led to Weaveworks CEO Alexis Richardson to coin the term, GitOps, which has taken the world by storm with a CNCF Working Group, GitOpsCon, GitOps Days, and several GitOps community groups. Moreover, leaders such as Kubernetes co-creators Brendan Burns and Joe Beda have stated how GitOps is a natural evolution of Kubernetes itself.

“GitOps practices and Flux has elevated our engineering: code infra as software, eliminate human intervention, accelerate lead time for changes - without compromising security requirements.”

Tahir Raza, Staff Engineer - Cloud & Platform Engineering at Best Buy

Intending to be the best GitOps tool available, the Flux project has evolved into a mature and trustworthy software. During its evolution, Flux has accomplished several goals such as low resource consumption by adopting a microservices architecture, safe multi-tenancy through its security-first design and support for bleeding edge innovation by having first-class support for technologies like OCI and Cosign.

We are proud to see that Flux is one of the few CNCF graduated projects and the GitOps tool that companies such as Microsoft, AWS, GitLab, D2iQ,q and more trust to deliver GitOps to their customers.

“Safaricom PLC provides mobile telephony, mobile money transfer, consumer electronics, e-commerce, cloud computing, data, music streaming, and fiber optic services to the Kenyan Market predominantly and to the wider East Africa. So, Flux has been an essential part of critical areas such as deployment frequency, standardization, and security, among other GitOps capabilities that help us to be competitive. We are excited about Flux 2.0 and the project’s continued maturity.”

Winnie Gakuru, DevSecOps Engineer II at Safaricom PLC

Flux General Availability

“EKS Anywhere has been providing GitOps capabilities with Flux to our happy enterprise customers. We’ve been testing Flux 2.0 since our EKS-A v0.16.0 release and it has been solid. Flux, as a CNCF Graduated project and now with its GitOps components at GA, has been reliable and enterprise grade so that we can deliver the best experience to the customers who depend on our quality of product.”

Joey Wang, Senior Software Engineer at Amazon Web Services

What does General Availability (GA) mean for you as a Flux user:

“Flux is often my go-to technology choice for building multi-cluster and even multi-region deployment patterns. It helps me enable teams in evolving their applications from one cluster to many with consistent and repeatable config.”

Bryan Oliver, Principal Engineer at Thoughtworks

This signifies that the APIs that have achieved GA (Generally Available) status are now considered stable and can be used with confidence in production environments. They offer backward compatibility, ensuring that existing implementations will continue to function as expected. Flux encompasses various APIs, but not all of them have attained GA status yet.

The APIs that have reached GA include:

• GitRepository: This API facilitates pulling configurations from Git repositories.
• Kustomization: It enables the application and synchronization of Kubernetes manifests defined in Git.
• Receiver API: This API triggers the reconciliation of Flux Custom Resources using webhooks.

It is important to note that these GA APIs will not undergo backwards-incompatible changes unless accompanied by a major version update and appropriate advance announcements As for the remaining Flux APIs, they will undergo further development and enhancements before being promoted to GA status at a later stage.

“GitLab picked Flux for its official GitOps integration within our GitLab agent for Kubernetes. Flux’s maturation and reliability have continued to show as we’ve tested Flux 2.0 in development. Now with Flux’s GA, we can continue to build the best user experience for our enterprise customers on solid foundations.”

Viktor Nagy, Senior Product Manager, Environments group at GitLab

Releases

“It has been a fantastic journey of rebuilding the original Flux into a microservices architecture, adding Flagger as a subproject, getting validated as a graduated project in the CNCF, and now reaching GA with Flux 2.0. I am grateful to work with great teams, maintainers, contributors, and partners, and then to see major enterprises and cloud providers relying on Flux to start or mature their Kubernetes journey. Keeping great company with users (the likes of Amazon AWS, D2iQ, Microsoft Azure, VMware, Weaveworks, GitLab, Volvo, SAP, Xenit and many more) keeps me motivated for the future innovations and growth for Flux.”

Stefan Prodan, Principal Developer Experience Engineer at Weaveworks, Flux maintainer and Flagger creator

Release Cadence: Flux will have at least three minor releases in a year following the Kubernetes release cadence. The release will happen roughly two weeks after a new Kubernetes release. The two weeks timeline can be adjusted if more time is needed for testing compatibility with the new Kubernetes version.

API Versioning: The Flux project follows the semver standard for versioning. Release candidates are marked as x.y.z-rc.a (e.g v1.0.0-rc.3) and stable releases are marked as x.y.z.

Support: Flux will support the last three minor release versions of a major release and the previous major release version for a year after its release. A newly released Flux version offers support for Kubernetes N-2 minor versions.

CVE Backport: We will backport bug fixes and security fixes to the last three minor releases as patch releases. Users are advised to run the latest patch release of a given minor release.

For more details on the release procedure, take a look at https://fluxcd.io/flux/releases.

“Xenit is proud to be contributors and maintainers of the Flux project, which is the GitOps tool of choice for enterprises and cloud providers such as Volvo, GitLab, Microsoft, and AWS. We are particularly proud to be part of Flux’s major milestones: not only graduating in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation some months ago, but now getting Flux to 2.0 and general availability. We enjoy being part of the Flux community and look forward to the next stages of this growing community.”

Simon Gottschlag, CTO at Xenit

How to get started?

• Watch our CNCF webinar on Flux 2.0, which has an intro to GitOps for newcomers and Flux 2.0-specific updates for existing users.
• Need extra support for Flux and Flagger? Check out the Flux support page and this August 2 webinar on Flux 2.0-specific support.

❤️ Your Flux maintainer, Somtochi Onyekwere, and project member, Tamao Nakahara.

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