Git-Centric Control for Multiclouds – InApps 2022

Weaveworks’s first general availability release of Weave GitOps Enterprise represents an ambitious effort to support the entire development and deployment process for CI/CD across Kubernetes environments. It also emphasizes Git-centric management of deployments across multiple Kubernetes clusters that extends to on-premises and multiple clouds.

“The generally available release of Weave GitOps Enterprise is about getting more and more features for multiple-cluster management from Git while supporting different cloud providers,” in addition to Amazon Web Services (AWS), and bare metal environments, Steve Waterworth, a technical marketing manager for Weaveworks, told InApps. “We can now say the platform is maturing. More new great stuff coming soon.”

Weave GitOps Enterprise builds on top of Weaveworks’ previously released open source alternative, Weave GitOps Core. Weave GitOps Core is used to help to simplify and automate the process of deploying code on what the company says can be “any Kubernetes cluster.” This involves a two-command line process without having to manually configure the cluster settings. Among other things, Weave GitOps Core also pre-configures the monitoring and observability tools for the clusters so that they continue to run uninterrupted during the deployment process.

In a blog post, Waterworth described how Weave GitOps Enterprise is the “first enterprise GitOps platform” that increases software delivery and operational performance for Kubernetes infrastructure and application teams. By supporting GitOps to unite application development and operations, the platform enables “earlier collaboration in the development process while delivering greater security, predictability and visibility throughout the entire application lifecycle,” Waterworth wrote. “Teams can automate Kubernetes through continuous application delivery and operational control at any scale and across deployment types including hybrid cloud, multicloud and edge,” Waterworth wrote.

Weave GitOps Enterprise’s key feature the company communicated include:

• Web User Interface: The dashboard provides an overview of provisioned clusters, for alerts, an application catalog and a cluster-template library. With GitOps, cluster management and profile catalogs are managed with Git pull requests and merges.

• Cluster Management: All clusters: regardless of the cloud provider or if they are in on-premises environments — are accessible and managed in a self-service way in a single repository with Git serving as the so-called “single source of truth.” Existing clusters can be imported and templates for creating new clusters are defined.

• Application Profile Catalogue: Application profiles are defined in catalogs, providing a set of approved applications that can be installed on clusters when the clusters are created or at a later time. A package may be a single application or a suite of applications (such as Prometheus, Grafana, Loki or Tempo for monitoring and observability, for example) that can be installed, updated or removed.

• Alert Options: The Weave GitOps Enterprise dashboard links to Prometheus Alert Manager to provide an overview of alerts across all clusters under management.

The ability to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters has come in especially handy for Deutsche Telekom, Waterworth told InApps. “They are managing thousands of Kubernetes clusters. They’re running on the edge of a significant number of the Deutsche Telekom cell towers you see in Germany,” Waterworth said. “They’re all managed in such a way that if they want to make a change, they make the change in Git, and that change gets automatically rolled out to thousands of Kubernetes clusters.”

As GitOps processes continue to evolve, so will Weave GitOps Enterprise. “We’ve gotten to the point with Weave GitOps Enterprise where it is highly useful to many people with its general availability,” Waterworth told InApps. “But that doesn’t mean to say development has now stopped — we’re working really hard to add more features that are on the roadmap for a broader range of cloud platforms.”