Skip to content
GitOps Days 2022
By Stacey Potter
July 07, 2022

GitOps Days 2022

What is GitOps Days?

Last month GitOps Days took place on June 8th and 9th. Hosted by Weaveworks and jam-packed with informative and educational sessions from speakers on varying levels of the cloud native spectrum. These speakers ranged from GitOps end-user practitioners at various stages of their GitOps journeys to integrators offering ways of extending and enhancing Kubernetes and GitOps, to vendors offering GitOps to their Enterprise Customers. The goal of the event is to evangelize GitOps as a de-facto cloud native operating model, practice and methodology, as well as help individuals and organizations get started wherever they are on their cloud native journey.

If you missed the live event, no worries - you can still get the on-demand livestream video links by signing up at gitopsdays.com, or checkout the individual sessions on the GitOps Days 2022 Playlist.

Keynotes

The event kicked off with a Keynote from Taylor Dolezal, Head of Ecosystem at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) who spoke about the CNCF ecosystem, GitOps’ journey as a natural evolutions of Kubernetes, and how you can get involved (spoiler alert: join the GitOps Working Group).

Up next was Philippe Ensarguet, CTO at Orange Business Services with GitOps is the way to overcome the scaling wall for enterprise organizations. He shared his learnings from consulting with other CTOs and the heads of technology from Orange’s customers and partners, some cloud native trends, and Orange’s GitOps journey.

In her keynote talk, GitOps’ Wealth of Opportunity, Mae Large, Staff Field Engineer at VMware, who has been a GitOps practitioner since 2019, shares benefits realized through Gitops from both the practice itself and a practitioner’s career. Mae also shares GitOps architectures and adoption approaches which she has been involved with.

And the last, but certainly not the least, of the keynotes was GitOps Business Benefits at State Farm from Rayce Brossette. Rayce spoke about the benefits of managing scale, money and time savings, as well as security from adopting GitOps with Flux at State Farm.

GitOps Practitioners Share their Experience

Flux end users and GitOps practitioners shared their GitOps journeys in a variety of ways.

Platform Vendors & Cloud Providers Offering GitOps with Flux

If you’re a practitioner or customer looking to move forward with GitOps, check out these talks from cloud providers and platform vendors who are offering GitOps to their customers (most trust Flux as their solution under the hood)!

  • Weave GitOps & Scaling Teams – James Wilson (Weaveworks) Weave GitOps is a suite of tools, powered by and extending Flux, focused on application lifecycle management and application delivery. James gives an overview and then shows the power of Weave GitOps with a demo!
  • GitOps in Microsoft Azure with Flux – Chris Sanders & Jonathan Innis (Microsoft) To provide Kubernetes admins and app developers with the latest tooling for managing configuration and application deployment, Azure enables GitOps with Flux. In this session, we will live demo how CNCF Flux is enabled in Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes and Azure Kubernetes Services and how management of GitOps-enabled clusters in Azure can be achieved at scale.
  • GitOps with Amazon EKS Anywhere – Chandler Hoisington & Joey Wang (AWS) Amazon EKS Anywhere helps you create and manage Kubernetes clusters in a declarative way with the help of GitOps. In this session, Chandler and Joey show how EKS Anywhere integrates with Flux and uses GitOps workflows to manage cluster lifecycle.
  • GitOps with VMware Tanzu Application Platform – Leigh Capili (VMware) Hear how the VMware Tanzu team have been using Flux and contributing to the project to provide GitOps to end users.
  • How D2iQ Operates Flux – Deepak Goel & Max Jonas Werner (D2iQ) Flux is at the center of D2iQ’s Kubernetes Platform, from bootstrapping clusters to managing multi-cluster workloads in a central manner. We are going to demonstrate how D2iQ keeps Flux versions up-to-date and manages installations across all managed clusters.
  • GitOps with Flux on OpenShift – Andrew Block (Red Hat) Andrew shares the business drivers for GitOps automation, an overview of OpenShift, and how Flux is a perfect match for GitOps on OpenShift. Andrew then demos deploying Flux through the OperatorHub, how platform teams can manage the deployment of namespaces on a kubernetes environment, how isolating different workloads within different namespaces enables better security, deploys an application to multiple namespaces, and finally how application & SRE teams can monitor the current state of the Flux platform as well as utilizing Policy Enforcement with either Gatekeeper or Kyverno.

GitOps Tools, Technologies, & Extensions

There were a multitude of talks focused around tools and technologies that enable, extend, and secure Kubernetes & GitOps. These sessions dive deep into the technical how-tos and show the extensibility and power of GitOps with Flux.

  • How to Reconcile Terraform Resources the GitOps Way! Priyanka “Pinky” Ravi, DX Engineer at Weaveworks & Roberth Strand, Head of Platform Engineering at Crayon and HashiCorp Ambassador, provide an in-depth look at the new Flux Terraform Controller, which enables Terraform deployments to be done the GitOps Way. They’ll end with a demo of a common use case implementation.
  • Securing Kubernetes Secrets for GitOps with HashiCorp Vault: Rosemary Wang, Developer Advocate at HashiCorp, outlines security and design considerations for each pattern and demonstrates them using Flux and HashiCorp Vault. You’ll be able to assess which patterns work best for your secrets management workflow.
  • Happier Helming with GItOps and Flux: Scott Rigby, Developer Experience Engineer at Weaveworks, Helm Maintainer, and Flux Maintainer, shares how Helm users can do things they've always wanted to do by using the Flux Helm controller – use Helm declaratively, run Helm unattended, auto-upgrade Helm CRDs, scale releases by storing charts as OCI artifacts, patch public charts in a structured way, and more!
  • VS Code GitOps Tools Extension (pre-release): Kingdon Barrett, OSS Engineer at Weaveworks and Flux Maintainer, shows the new GitOps Tools Extension for VS Code and how it helps minimize context switching, keeping you in your editor where you can be most productive!
  • Flagger + Linkerd Revisited: How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Use A/B Testing: Jason Morgan, Technical Evangelist at Buoyant walks you through Linkerd and Flagger, and shows you how to make them work together. He also shows an example of how to use an ingress to allow you to do A/B testing on the basis of headers or cookies. Then talks through the theory, whiteboards for those that want to see it, and gives a demo you can reference for when you want to do it on your own.
  • Security First — The Benefits of Integrating Security Tools into Your GitOps Workflow: AnaĂŻs Urlichs, Open Source Developer Advocate at Aqua Security, explores the overlap between Security and GitOps processes. Through a demo, AnaĂŻs highlights the benefits for engineers of integrating security tools into your GitOps workflow.
  • Applying GitOps to Everything with Crossplane + Flux: Viktor Farcic, Developer Advocate at Upbound, shows you how to leverage the extensibility of Crossplane and Flux to apply GitOps not only to applications running in Kubernetes, but to everything (infrastructure, services, applications running anywhere, etc)!

Next Steps

If you missed the livestream, no worries you can still get the livestream links by signing up at gitopsdays.com. But if you just want to watch the individual sessions, check out the GitOps Days 2022 Playlist. And chat with GitOps Days attendees and speakers on slack (invite yourself at https://slack.weave.works) and join the #gitopsdays channel.

Share