 My name is Dan Garfield. If you don't know me, I am the co-founder and chief open source officer of Co-Presh and we're a company that focuses really on GitOps and development tools that help people deliver deployment tools and help people deliver software more quickly and more reliably and we've been doing this for five or six years now. And it's really grown in a very dramatic way and been very exciting. And I've been very lucky to participate in the founding of the GitOps working group and Open GitOps. So we're gonna give kind of a community update today and we'll cover like kind of a smattering of topics and it's somewhat informal. And so feel free to blow up the chat. I'll be watching the chat and looking for comments and questions and happy to answer any of those. So, but Cornelia gave a really good kind of background about where GitOps came from. And one of the thoughts I was having as she was covering that and she was mentioning some of this stuff like these tools, these ideas existed, they've been around. And we'll talk a little bit about some of the ideas that came out of the GitOps principles. I know Christian covered some of those as well. And if you're not familiar with them, we'll do like maybe just a quick rehash if we have time. But I think that these ideas of GitOps are really a collection of best practices and principles that people have been doing for a long time, but they have been very difficult to implement. And so what we found is that there were a few kind of savants who had implemented this kind of stuff years ago, but that largely these things were really inaccessible to everybody else. And so what we're really working on is doing what Henry Ford did for the car. He didn't invent the car, but he got it in everybody's house. And that's what we're trying to do with GitOps and open GitOps is really make this stuff super accessible. Kubernetes is a key unlock, like Cornelia mentioned, you don't have to be doing Kubernetes to implement the GitOps principles, but Kubernetes just does make it damn easy, that's for sure. So there are, you can implement it in other systems, but Kubernetes definitely makes it easier. So yeah, excited to share some of this stuff. Now with the GitOps working group, which was founded under the CNCF, it's a CNCF sandbox project. This was really what we needed to bootstrap what the current project is, which is open GitOps. And so with the GitOps working group, this is founded by CodeFresh, Weaveworks, Red Hat, GitHub, Azure, I feel like I'm forgetting somebody which is like never good. You never want to forget somebody when you're mentioning all the names. Yeah, oh, Amazon, I was forgetting Amazon. So we basically got together and we said, okay, let's formalize these principles because a lot of people are talking about GitOps, but there is a big problem in the industry of not understanding what GitOps is and not having kind of a consensus around what GitOps is. And one of my colleagues, Kostas Caplonis, if you haven't followed him, he's great. He gave a talk where he said, he asked at the beginning, how many of you are doing GitOps today? And it was like, 80% of the audience was like, oh yeah, we're doing GitOps. We're fully implemented on GitOps. We're all in on the GitOps train, no worries. And then he gave his talk on the GitOps principles. And then afterwards he said, okay, how many of you, now that you've seen the principles, are doing GitOps today? And suddenly instead of 80% of the audience, it was like 4% of the audience was like, oh yeah, we're doing that. It turns out that there's just a lot of misconceptions about what GitOps is. And people kind of hear it and they say, oh, GitOps means operations by pull request. And that's part of it. And they're like, yeah, I mean, we've got Terraform, we've tossed it in a Git repo. And if we wanna make a change, we make a change and we commit it to Git. And that's deployed then automatically. And so we're doing GitOps. Well, they're missing actually some pretty critical key components, like was mentioned earlier. So that education, and we'll talk about those in a minute, but that education is just really, really critical. And we need help to do it. I mean, within the GitOps, within open GitOps, there's a handful of maintainers. There are a number of people to participate in the community, but we need people to continue to spread and evangelize these messages and help build it out and help get it out there. So one of the things that I wanna ask from the community side is definitely for your help, for anybody who's listening, if you wanna get involved in GitOps, I'll share a little bit more about how to do that, but we definitely need that help. So that's kind of the quickest introduction to like our mission is really to educate. And it's also provide principles and standardization that allows companies to innovate. So for example, with these cloud operators, we want the cloud operators to be able to look at these principles and say, hey, are we enabling people to do GitOps with our offering? If you're at a company, and I've talked to a number of companies who've reached out to me around this kind of stuff to say, hey, can you present on the GitOps principles and share this stuff? Cause we really wanna be GitOps oriented, but we maybe don't fully understand what that means. That's something that we can do. So from an open GitOps priority standpoint, we really wanna do a lot of education. That's a super high priority. So we run, we grant GitOps con as well as some other GitOps oriented events. This event that Christian has put on, Red Hat's a member organization. And so they're putting this on under the auspices of open GitOps, which is fantastic. We did last year, we had a CNCF ambassador from Brazil reach out and say, hey, we wanna do a GitOps day. And we worked with them to help make sure that they had all those principles present and making sure that all that education was happening. So education is a big thing they were working on. And there are a number of different initiatives within the project to help enable education beyond the events. Now, two of those that I'll mention, which are kind of currently going through the committee visual process stuff. But on the open GitOps website, we have the principles. And sometimes people look at those principles and they're like, yeah, this seems really simple. They're designed to be simple. And they may miss some of the nuance that's reflected in those principles. But basically what we'd like to do in addition to those principles, and of course we list events on the website and stuff like that. We also like to get out a section so that people can share and look at patterns and reference architecture. So if you're using AWS and Vault and MySQL, we want you to be able to look and find reference architectures that people contributed to say, here's how we set up GitOps. Here are some of the considerations we have for stateful applications. Here are some of the considerations we had for using AWS. Here are some of the considerations we had for using Bitbucket or whatever. So that it's easier to adopt this stuff. Because again, we're trying to do what Henry Ford did for cars, we're trying to make them really accessible. We're trying to make GitOps really accessible. So that's one of the initiatives. And then another is there are a number of open questions within the GitOps principles that the, or I should say the GitOps principles don't cover. So for example, secret management is something that we talk a little bit about in the principles or we reference. But how to do that, how to version it, how to keep it secure, those things are actually really important. And there are a lot of nuances to how you handle secrets in both a secure way and like a scalable GitOps way. And the principles purposely don't cover that. So we actually have an initiative to create what is essentially like peer review journal within the GitOps project so that people can submit these white papers at exploring these topics that could potentially come up for community adoption. But they're basically it's like, okay, somebody submitted a paper and it is within what we believe to be the GitOps principles and raises some important interesting questions that the community we think should consider and may have offer some interesting solutions. We'd like to publish that but we'd like to publish it without necessarily endorsing that as an official position. So when we look at the GitOps principles just to share kind of the process of this and actually we'll come back to the events in a second but the GitOps principles version 1.0 we had over 96 different interested parties involved in that we had over 60 different companies. This was to create four principles. It's very short and that's the effort that it took to get there because when you create standards creation is tricky. So when we put out those principles we're doing that with the full backing of these 60 companies, these 96 interested parties and these dozens of co-authors who have looked at these principles and said, yeah, we agree. Like we vote to adopt these principles. And so when we put that out there is a really, really high bar and degree of confidence in those principles. So when we say that we want to have this sort of white paper peer review process what we're saying is there needs to be a place for GitOps thought and discussion that is not necessarily fully endorsed. That this is a place where we can explore kind of the ideas and some of the rough edges and some of these patterns that were that like Christian was talking about you obviously you don't have to use customized to do GitOps, but it is definitely a very popular pattern that we're seeing. And so discussing like the challenges of dealing with overlays, for example these are things that we want to do. So if those initiatives sound interesting to you we'd love to have your involvement, get involved. And we can talk about those principles a little bit in a second. Some of the other things that we have coming up if you missed it, GitOps Con LA was the most popular and in my view successful co-located event at KubeCon LA. It was the largest co-located event done with KubeCon and it was very, very popular. So we definitely encourage you if you haven't seen the talks I highlighted the talk by Ricardo Roca like he gave a talk about how CERN is using GitOps with Argo CD to and crossplane to manage massive infrastructure and I just saw an article today talking about how they sort of gobbled up all of the GPUs in the cloud for all of the stuff they're doing. Chick-fil-A gave a great talk about how they're using Argo CD and GitOps at all of their locations to manage all of the services in every store. Starbucks gave a talk discussing how they're using Flux and Argo CD and GitOps to do services in their stores. So there's an edge use case here that's really interesting. State Farm gave a talk focused on Flux. Now this is another thing. Right now, Flux and Argo CD are really the leading GitOps solutions out there but they're not the only ones and there are a lot of kind of commercial partners. We would love to get them involved. So if you're looking at, hey, we're doing this GitOps thing from our company we wanna have representation within GitOpsCon. Go get in here, you're welcome. This is an open source initiative. It is not tool specific. It's vendor agnostic. So we wanna hear about how you're doing GitOps and we wanna hear what tools you're using. So please come do that. If you haven't seen the YouTube playlist, it's fantastic. If you just search GitOpsConLA on YouTube you'll find the playlist and maybe somebody can post it in the chat but the playlist is very good, the talks are very good. So check those out and share them because there's so many patterns and really interesting ideas. There are a number of talks about security that like blew my mind with how deep they were and how insightful they were. So check those out. And upcoming, of course, we have another GitOpsCon happening in May, May 17th in Valencia. There will be, I believe that I can't remember exactly what the status is of the hybrid nature of the virtual event. I believe it- Definitely hybrid this time too. It's going to be- In person will happen but there's gonna be hybrid. So if you're somewhere in the world and you can't get to Spain, sign up and go. Perfect, thank you, Diane. Yeah, and shout out to Christian and Red Hat for taking the lead on this event and getting it organized. CFPs are still open. They close on February 14th. So if you have an awesome GitOps use case or you know someone that does go get them to submit their CFPs. We want the best talks. We want the best real-life use cases, best reference architectures. And when I say that, you know, if you think, hey man, I'm just doing a small thing. It's not that cool, submit the talk anyway because A, we may actually think that it's better than you do and watch you come and give that talk. But B, we also look at these talks and there are a number of GitOps events that happen and meetups and things. And we look at those talks submissions and say, hey, actually maybe we can have this person come present in a community meeting or maybe we can have this person come and just record a video or whatever. So please, you know, submit those talks. You don't think it's there. Let us be the judge of it, okay? Get your talks in, please, please, please. Don't wait until Valentine's Day, if that's right. Don't wait until Valentine's Day to get those talks submitted. There are better things to do on Valentine's Day. Yes, it didn't submit us. We just talked the last minute, yes. Actually, I like to add to this also about submitting the talk, Dan, everything. And to add to that, we're gonna have dual track this time in GitOpsCon. So don't think, so if you think, like Dan said, if you don't think you have a good idea, submit it anyway because we have a dual track now. So there's not even a more of a chance for your top to be submitted, to be accepted. All right, so we do have to get you to wrap up a little bit, Dan. Okay, okay, okay. Because we have a wonderful end user end on OpenGitOps working group. Oh, that's fine, yeah, you're great, you're great. So thank you, thank you everybody for joining. Please get involved, go to opengitOps.dev. Click the Get Involved tab. We've got a subreddit, we've got a Slack channel, lots of GitHub discussions, there's open meetings. We are looking for more help, we need you to do it. Thank you so much, take care, go GitOps.