Several companies have announced that they will join the Flux CD platform in the wake of continued uncertainty over the project, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) recently announced.
The continuous delivery tool faced a worrying future when Weaveworks, the employer of most of the project's maintainers, announced it would end commercial operations.
Now, a number of companies have committed to supporting Flux CD, including Microsoft Azure and Edgecell, as well as other “long-time Flux adopters” such as Cisco.
GitLab specifically announced its support for Flux CD, revealing in early 2023 that it would integrate Flux with its agent for Kubernetes as the “recommended GitOps solution.”
This new commitment to Flux CD will help ensure the continued maintenance and development of the Flux GitOps tool, as well as the delivery of applications and platforms in a move that will transition the project into a “stronger and broader community.”
“This is a great example of the strength and resilience of our community and we look forward to the continued evolution and growth of Flux,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF.
Flux CD lead maintainer Stefan Prodan commented on the future of the project, expressing his gratitude towards the CNCF while also asking the community to help shape the future of the platform.
“We want to allow community members to take full ownership of Flux features and share responsibility for feature stability and long-term maintenance,” Prodan said.
Amanda Brock, chief executive of OpenUK, said ITPro Continued support for Flux CD will ensure the platform is “future-proofed” and highlighted the crucial role open source industry stakeholders have played during this disruption.
ControlPlane support specifically, Amanda said, will help ensure that all core project maintainers are employed in the future, paving the way for a Flux CD future that is open and commercially viable.
“The intervention of a second open source company means that they understand how to manage a revenue model, which we hope will be more successful this time and allow it to continue,” Brock said.
Flux CD's turbulent period began when Weaveworks announced it would end operations earlier this year.
Pressure from competitors in the space, such as CircleCI and Harness Labs, made the company's financial sustainability difficult, ultimately resulting in the termination of business operations.
Prodan said Forbes This incident highlighted the precarious nature of open source projects that rely heavily on a single organization or a limited number of maintainers.
This is a question that has plagued the open source community in one way or another for some time, with projects often problematically dependent on individual organizations.
“When you look at any project, one of the biggest problems we've seen is single-source products, where you have a company that is totally focused on one product and employs everyone who works on it,” Brock said. “That dependency is enormously problematic.”
Without a large, healthy community surrounding a project, it is easy for a company to abandon open source while threatening the stability of the overall project.
Examples of such deviations from open source can be seen in companies such as Redis, which recently announced its move to 'source available'either Hashi Corp, which moved to Business Source License (BSL) in 2023.
The survival of Flux CD is cause for celebration, Brock added, as it points to a resilient forward momentum in the open source community often unparalleled elsewhere.
“I think what we also see is the power of continuity that open source offers that you'll never see in proprietary code,” Brock said.
Although companies can overcome business closures in the proprietary code landscape, Brock said it's difficult to replicate the “momentum and continuity” of open source that the community has seen with Flux CD.
