Weave GitOps 2022.09 simplifies application deployment into any Kubernetes environment

Weaveworks has released Weave GitOps 2022.09 to automate trusted application delivery and secure infrastructure operations on premise, in the cloud and at the edge.

The latest release makes it easier for teams to deploy applications into any Kubernetes environment using progressive delivery strategies. Weave GitOps automates reliable release deployment, reducing the risk of errors or service failures by enabling teams to audit whether their applications are following security best practices and preventing deployments that break those policies.

Together, application automation accelerates efficiency, compliance, and velocity, boosting deployment confidence.

The 2022.09 Weave GitOps introduces accelerated application onboarding, end to end automation of application delivery, and new observability dashboards that visualize progressive rollouts across environments and policy violation alerts.

“The new capabilities in Weave GitOps enables teams to deploy applications into production quickly, reliably and safely. Our goal is to remove the unnecessary complexities and toils that teams go through with each production deployment: deploying into production should be as easy as snapping your fingers,” said James Wilson, Weaveworks director of product management.

“With GitOps a developer can easily define a deployment strategy, and then it’s a simple git push to roll out to production”., Wilson continued.

This release brings with it:

• Increased application deployments reliability with progressive delivery. Teams can deploy new code using progressive delivery which constantly monitors the deployment and automates recovery if there are issues. Using GitOps automation, users can choose a deployment strategy – for example canary, blue/green or split testing – and then deploy across one or many Kubernetes environments. Unlike code-based systems, GitOps progressive delivery does not require any changes to the application and will work with any container-based service, making it easy for teams to use.
• Application policies strengthen security. Using familiar Git workflows, DevOps teams can manage the active security and policies that are applied to their clusters and namespaces. Enforcement of active policies occurs at multiple points in the software lifecycle: pull request, build, deploy and run time. Out of the box comes a curated library of 100+ policies covering industry standards and best practices (PCI-DSS, SOC II, GDPR, MITRE ATTACK, HIPAA), resilience and coding standards.
• Effortless application onboarding and operations. Platform operators can make use of an enhanced version of team workspaces introducing multi-tenancy and application portability. Segmentation of responsibilities and enforcement of change control policies decrease errors and reduce governance overhead. Platform operators assign a team to workspaces in multiple clusters, allowing change deployments across the fleet via Git.

Weave GitOps makes progressive delivery available to any development team

Development teams want to deploy new capabilities into the hands of their customers as quickly as possible, but every new deployment is a risk. If a new deployment doesn’t perform as expected there could be poor service or even downtime.

Progressive delivery mitigates this risk by providing deployment strategies and automation to carefully put new versions into production, ensuring the service is healthy and limiting the impact of a bad deployment. Progressive delivery uses metrics from the service to automate the promotion or rollback of the deployment.

Weave GitOps lets you deploy any container-based workload progressively without having to make any changes to the application code. This brings the power of progressive delivery to any microservice.

Built on Flux, a Weaveworks-sponsored Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project, Weave GitOps also adds actionable dashboards to visualize rollouts and report on progressive delivery success or failure. Weave GitOps’ progressive delivery can be used with a wide range of ingress controllers and services meshes including AWS AppMesh, Contour, Istio, NGINX, Gloo, Linkerd and Traefik.

Weave GitOps automated progressive delivery boosts trust and confidence in deployment patterns and instills accelerated innovation in DevOps teams through visualizing rollouts and notifying on progress, success or failure. The GitOps dashboard monitors canaries in flight and deployment status across all clusters and environments.

Application policies strengthen security

Weave GitOps provides a library of security policies and best practices (PCI-DSS, SOC II, GDPR, MITRE ATTACK, HIPAA) which teams can use to ensure their Kubernetes clusters and container-based applications are secure and comply with the latest standards.

Application operators want to deploy safely, but don’t have the expertise to know all Kubernetes best practices. Weave GitOps bundles a set of best practices and automation to help application teams follow them.

Each application deployment goes through a pipeline that ensures that all policies have been met and if there are any violations, recommendations are provided on how to remediate the issue. These guard-rails increase developer autonomy by shifting security left, reducing the process bottlenecks and increasing the speed of software delivery.

Additionally, platform operators have the ability to view their compliance posture across all their clusters so that they have a complete view of their estate. Easy to navigate dashboards show the compliance posture by different areas, severity and relevance to compliance standards.

All policies are built on the Open Policy Agent (OPA) standards, making it easy for users to build their own policies that suit their organizations needs. Reducing the risk of bad deployments from human error and automating simple remediation increase the speed and reliability of software delivery.

Multi-tenancy and application portability with Team Workspaces

Team workspaces enable Kubernetes environments to be split into separate areas, segmenting responsibilities and preventing tenants from breaking each other’s services. Each workspace can have individual policies that enforce change control, making it easy for multiple teams to work within the same environment.

Weave GitOps uses familiar Git based workflows to provide clear change control and audit logs that enforce security, compliance and reduce the time from code to production.

The single point of control makes it easy to deploy the same application into many different clusters, even across cloud and hybrid environments, reducing operational complexity and costs. Cluster operators can assign a team to workspaces in multiple clusters, allowing change deployments across the fleet via Git.

The segmented access feature facilitates coordination and collaboration between multiple development and operations teams across large organizations.