 Hi, this is your host of the party and today we have with us once again, Alexis Richardson CEO at we've works Alexis great to have you back on the show after a very long time great to be back. So up nil nice to see you again And today we are going to talk about flux graduation But before we talk about graduation itself what it means I will talk a bit about or tell our viewers a bit about What is flux get ops? And talk a bit about a stool in the modern quality word get ops is Automation automated IT powered by agents that run in your runtime environments based on Configuration plans that you supply separately and we say get ops because often we keep those config plans or config files and get There are other idempotent Immutable artifacts that people run Like container images signed images other artifacts as well as config files when we talk about get ops We really mean Taking all of those immutable things running them for you automatically in in your runtime So that you don't have to have a human being or a system programmatically touching the runtime When you're not supposed to so it can be separated from you for example We use get ops with Deutsche telecom To manage thousands of telco towers running 5g in kubernetes clusters lots per tower and wouldn't it be nice if you could update that software Make sure that it's running correctly Without having any insecure connection to the to the tower or sending an engineer and that's really what get ops lets you do Flux CD is a continuous deployment tool based on get ops Which is used to power kubernetes clusters application deployment So if you want to use Jenkins with kubernetes or github actions or git lab with kubernetes Just get flux and flux will glue them together and give you CD. So now you have CI CD for kubernetes The other thing that people are using this for is what people are calling now platform engineering So you've heard of paths. So you have infrastructure paths and then apps Where CI CD is about app deployment platform engineering is about platform deployment Creating your own custom environments Usually for enterprises like fidelity or Deutsche telecom to run applications and you can use flux with kubernetes and cappy to do this now You just specify what components you want to run in kubernetes and then you have your platform Obviously, there's a bit more to it than that That's the core idea and then finally the other thing you can do that's called flux is manage infrastructure So you can use the flux terraform integration or the flux polumi integration and Other integrations and that will let you coordinate between kubernetes applications and clusters and Infrastructure using terraform or polumi or crossplane or one of those tools So really what's emerging is an automated stack for IT based on cloud native and that is pretty cool I talk a bit about the progress within the Flux project and also you talk about that we're talking about platform engineering now So also talk about the evolution of the cultural aspect as well and how flux guitars fit into the picture So flux came into the picture Five or six years ago. We've works originally wrote some open-source technology And created a SAS product running on Amazon EC2 To make it easy to manage and monitor applications running in the cloud that were based on containers What we got right about that Was people do need management and they do need monitoring But it was very early times in the market and many people came to us and said we love your SAS tool We love the idea of deploying and managing applications this way, but right now. We're still trying to get our first cluster set up Can you help us with this and what we had done in building this SAS as we had built it on top of Kubernetes So our engineering team had greatly had a Kubernetes based stack for deploying a SAS in multiple locations on Amazon So we've had redundancy 24-7 we could do, you know continuous delivery of rollouts and patches all of this cool stuff securely With automation and people said well actually what we're really interested in is how do you're doing that? Because we want to do that too And we had written several tools some of which you've seen in the CNCF to do different parts of this And the one that did the deployment piece for deploying the apps and clusters was called flux And so we open-sourced this and started working on it as a collaborative project Across different use cases and customers and then later on we integrated it with things like, you know Kubernetes cappy Terraform and Pulumi as I mentioned a few minutes ago, but in the beginning it was really an app deployment tool and Then we applied to move it into the CNCF where it became Sandboxed and incubated then graduated yesterday, which is that, you know, a long journey The graduation process is very intensive with a lot of tests of security enterprise use Community usability so it's it's it's really battle-hardened at this point But I think from a social perspective what's interesting is the ecosystem side, you know You would never quite know how people are going to use these technologies and that's one for me That's one of the great benefits of open-source, especially in a foundation environment So Amazon, Microsoft and VMware to name three really big companies have all put flux at the heart of their businesses It's running EKS anywhere It's running the as your cloud for a Amazon Sorry for as your Kubernetes and arc and it's running Tanzu application platform That's incredible and then you hold the other people doing other integrations, too We've works have released something called we've get ups that integrates it with Kubernetes and adds features like Developer on ramps and GUIs and so on so everybody's used it in a different way and for me That's the most exciting part is watching this this explosion of innovation around CICD platform Who's using it? I mean, of course There's a large ecosystem community But when I say who's using is I want to know a bit about the specific use cases that either you are interested in and you're like Hey, this is very do is driving some of that option. So obviously I mentioned Amazon Microsoft Tanzu are using it at scale along with messes fear Ali Baba, then you have the enterprise users People like fidelity. I love the Deutsche telecom use case of rolling out 5g That was one of the first global rollouts of 5g Took much less time than people expected. It was super exciting. We even had an HA event during the process Which was unexpected get ops Which is what we call this whole technology pattern fixed the HA for us when a node went down the good ops process is just brought it back up again One other cool project Kubernetes at home Is using flux very very much and a great high scale People who've spoken at recent conferences if you look at get ops con and get upstays, you'll see all sorts of examples State farm using flux or terraform Volvo What are they called Luna way Casper is always talking at the conferences quite a few different people in terms of interesting use cases The ones I'm fondest of are the ones where there's high-scale involved people pushing the envelope So for example managing thousands of clusters or doing Very large numbers of deployments. These are the ones that are the most exciting Can you also talk about sometime what happens with a lot of project that come into existence? You know as you know Emerge from the work you folks are doing there You are solving a specific problem internally and that's why you created, you know a specific technology project But sometimes you know when you put it out and folks start using it for use cases I mean Linux is a very good example Kubernetes itself is a good example Well, we are not writing our toasters on Kubernetes yet, but maybe one day But so talk a bit about the flux itself where you have seen Yes, so one surprising use case that I like talk about because it's public and easy to read about is the United States Air Force so This is documented on the CNCF website people are using flux and Kubernetes to manage in-flight systems for jets in the in the Air Force And I believe that the role of flux is to synchronize The right software inside Kubernetes make sure the apps are up to date and Periodically when there's a connection obviously in a plane the connection is intermittent You get the software will correct itself and load you version So it's great to feel that a tool like flux is part of helping for example The Ukrainians in their current situation because you know It's difficult for us in tech to talk about military applications Many people feel uncomfortable talking about that But I think you know the force of the military can be part of defense as well as some of its other uses too So I think that's great What else can I say Kubernetes at home is another interesting and surprising example Telco Taz is another one we certainly didn't expect now. Let's talk about graduation What does it mean for the project for the community and for the larger ecosystem? So graduation is like getting a PhD they can't take it away from you once you got it. So that's great I think it's it's become so intense now that it is like getting a PhD in being a good project This means that flux is now among the elite of proven Security audited Verified projects use that as efficient scale scope and duration Longevity that it's safe to consider them here to stay. I think that's the key point about graduation It's also a way of measuring health in terms of the production processes the sponsorship processes the community processes The quality of the code the quality of the processes all of these things are so so important to to the maintainers of flux I just can't tell you how important it is to them that this is seen in that way And so for them it's a validation of years and years and years of work So I want to say thank you to them right now. Thank you Let's talk a bit about of course, this is an open source project people are involved But what are things that are in the pipeline that that you folks are working on that? Hey, these are the either problem that you're trying to solve or this is the improvement that you want to make So the big thing with GitOps is how do you scale it beyond one cluster one repo? And there's lots of different ways of doing that. So we've seen early tools like flagger, which is about progressive rollouts We're seeing things like policy policy as code be integrated with GitOps Flux has a particularly cool feature using caverno for multi tenancy or you can see look at the OCI support for flux Now that we have OCI as a standard image format that gives us a scalable way to distribute secure images through CDNs That's just incredibly powerful and you then you have fleet scale management as well. So all of these things packaging Pipelining policy ill begin with PE apart from fleets are all ways of scaling GitOps that I think of the next phase What else can I say the extension beyond Kubernetes is fundamental You know, GitOps has proven to be the operating model for deployment and management of Kubernetes stacks People are agreeing on this now tell me we do platform engineering. What about all of those? non-Kubernetes based applications VMs databases machines On-prem hybrid legacy services all of this stuff What we're finding is if you integrate Kubernetes and flux with other orchestration tools like crossplane Terraform Pulumi telco tools, you can have a cross-data center Integration for GitOps for everything. So that's really really great. We love that Those are all new things at Weaveworks The way that you should look at this is through the lens of weave GitOps We've GitOps is an open-source developer platform tool Based on flux and Kubernetes which gives you a really easy developer studying experience and on-ramp Get rid of all kinds of application development pain points gives you a nice GUI is incredibly extensible and from for a business point of view We extend it by adding commercial extensions. So you pay for those. It's very similar to using Grafana You can have a great time using free Grafana or you can pay and have extra Grafana plugins Alexis once again thank you so much for taking time out today and of course talk about flux GitOps and Some of the exciting use cases. Thanks for all those, you know gradient sites and as is all I would love to sit down and chat with you again Thank you. Thank you so up nil so nice to see you again