This blog has been co-authored by Chris Sanders, Senior Program Manager, Azure Arc at Microsoft.
GitOps capabilities have been an integral part of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) since its preview in December 2021 and Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes since it’s launch at Ignite in 2021.
Today, we are pleased to announce the General Availability of GitOps with Flux v2 in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes (Arc K8s). With this release, Azure supports GitOps configuration and workload management for your entire cloud and hybrid Kubernetes estate – clusters in AKS and clusters on-premises or in other public clouds. Flux v2 is a major update bringing a Kubernetes-native architecture, observability, and multi-tenancy among other improvements. With a single tool and process, you can manage your modern applications in Kubernetes everywhere.
Teams running modern, cloud-native applications need reliable, automated processes for managing Kubernetes cluster configuration and application lifecycle. GitOps is a technique for implementing continuous deployment for these applications and configurations and focuses on using tools and processes developers and cluster admins are familiar with, like Git and pull requests. GitOps enables infrastructure as code, where the state of the environment is declaratively described in Git repositories. Changes to the workload environment, such as an application update, happen via pull request to the Git repository, after which Flux, running in each cluster, automatically syncs the changes and applies them to the cluster. Flux also continuously assures that the cluster remains in the declared state. GitOps enables accurate change management and audit, as cluster state and all changes are fully visible in the Git repository. It also enhances cluster security, as developers and deployment tools don’t need direct access to clusters. In short, GitOps is the modern way to manage continuous deployment for your containerized workloads, and Azure GitOps with Flux brings this capability to you.
Azure uses open source CNCF Flux to enable GitOps in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) or Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes (Arc K8s) clusters. Azure provides simple install, automatic update, and health reporting to simplify your use of GitOps across one to thousands of clusters.
In Azure, GitOps with Flux v2 is enabled as a cluster extension to your AKS or Arc K8s clusters. The Flux extension installs the Flux controllers in the clusters.
After Flux is enabled, you can then create one or more GitOps configurations in each cluster which enable the connections to your Git repositories and the deployment of the resources defined in the repositories.
Importantly, in Azure you can track the compliance state of the deployments in each cluster to assure that the clusters are in the state you declared in your Git repositories. This gives you the observability you need to assure healthy cluster state.
We also are happy to announce the release of the new GitOps extension for VS Code. You can manage GitOps with Flux in your AKS, Arc-enabled Kubernetes, or other Kubernetes clusters directly within the VS Code client. This can simplify the developer inner loop when working with clusters managed by GitOps Flux.
Some key features are:
This is an open-source project, and your contributions are welcome to improve the GitOps extension.
The work to integrate Flux in Azure GitOps, enhance Flux capabilities, and create the VS Code extension has been done in partnership with Weaveworks and the Flux maintainers. Microsoft is continuing to partner with Weaveworks and participate in advancing the Flux CNCF project and OpenGitOps.
We are excited for you to start using the new capabilities in GitOps with Flux v2 in Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes. For details on how you can get started, please see these documents:
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