Celebrating Ten Years of Flux CD

Ten years ago today, on July 7, 2016, Flux CD was born. What started at Weaveworks as a fresh take on continuous delivery went on to define GitOps and became a CNCF graduated project trusted to run critical infrastructure around the world.

I wrote my first patch for Flux back in 2018, in the Weaveworks era. Since then I helped rebuild it as Flux 2, taking it through CNCF graduation and growing an ecosystem of projects around it. What kept me around all these years are the people, from the maintainers I’ve spent countless hours designing APIs and reviewing code with, to the users who keep bringing us hard problems worth solving.

After a decade, the numbers speak for themselves: over 1,000 contributors, almost 18,000 pull requests across 44 repositories, and more than 30 billion container image downloads for Flux 2 alone. Today Flux runs in 5G infrastructure, retail stores, cloud control planes, airplanes, tractors, satellites, and countless air-gapped networks. And when the workday is over, Flux keeps running at home, on our homelabs.

The first decade of Flux was about machines applying what humans decide. The next decade brings AI agents into that loop, turning diagnostics and config changes into pull requests that other agents and hopefully people will review and approve. Our focus now is building the APIs and tools that make Flux the natural home for AI-driven GitOps.

For the full story of the decade, from fluxd and the invention of GitOps to the rebuild as the GitOps Toolkit and what comes next, read the anniversary post by Leigh Capili on the Flux website: Flux turns 10!

Happy birthday Flux, and thank you for using it!