Celebrating a Year of Commitment to CNCF Flux: Sustainability, Innovation, and Growth

In January, ControlPlane recognised an opportunity to contribute to the open source ecosystem when Flux faced a funding transition from its progenitor WeaveWorks. The community’s needs aligned with our development and DevSecOps capabilities, leading us to employ the core maintainers to continue their essential work supporting for Flux’s substantial user base with features, patches, and implementation.

We ensured the maintainers had the time and focus required to continue development efforts undisturbed, and considered monetisation strategies for the open source project.

The Risk and Reward of Sustaining Open Source

The vision and tremendous effort the dedicated Flux team has put into the project are reflected in its adoption: it is the de facto GitOps toolkit for securely and efficiently managing business-critical deployments at scale. Flux is trusted to run everything from spacecraft and planes to telecommunications networks and financial institutions — and some of the biggest Flux deployments exist at an even greater scale.

As a bootstrapped and independent organisation, ControlPlane’s commitment required balancing financial risk with a strategic focus of effort.

Widening the scope of the business — from a cloud native consultancy with open source projects, to safeguarding Flux’s future as a CNCF project — was not a decision we made lightly. Sustaining and growing a project of Flux’s calibre required not only bootstrap funding, but collaboration from the rest of the business to integrate and support our consulting efforts around developer velocity, DevSecOps, and progressive delivery.

It is rewarding to see that commitment has fostered renewed confidence and collaboration from the community and customers.

By stewarding Flux at a pivotal moment, its hard-won reputation as a stable and trusted GitOps solution was preserved. This has strengthened ControlPlane’s position as a trusted partner for maintaining and securing critical open source infrastructure for systems aligned with our core consultancy offering.

Ensuring Flux Thrives for Enterprise-grade Use Cases

Flux is a CNCF graduated open source project, and we recognised early on that further support was needed. Enterprises, particularly those in regulated and business-critical industries, require more than great software. They need trusted partners who intimately understand their unique challenges and can deliver solutions that meet stringent security, scalability, and reliability requirements.

ControlPlane has earned that trust through years of consultancy work in some of the world’s most heavily regulated organisations and sectors, including financial services, telecommunications, and government. Strict compliance mandates and fault tolerance are table stakes for business-critical infrastructure, and our hands-on experience delivering secure, scalable cloud native solutions has given us unparalleled insight into the specific needs of these domains.

ControlPlane Enterprise Flux was designed with these customer requirements in mind. It offers enhanced security features, dedicated enterprise support and assurance, and robust new scaling tools tailored to address the challenges of cloud native workloads in regulated industries globally.

We have extended the project’s core functionality with a dedicated Kubernetes operator to run Flux on autopilot mode, managing security and lifecycle across complex hybrid-cluster deployments. The Flux Operator is fully open source under AGPL, and bundled under a commercial licence in ControlPlane Enterprise for Flux CD.

The Enterprise offering also sustains the open source CNCF Flux project with a sustainable revenue model directly funding the maintainers. It continues the open source offering for anybody to consume, and the financial freedom allows our core maintainers to stay focused on upstream development without the pressure of securing funding.

Flux in 2025

We are happy to announce that the Flux core maintainers have published the 2025 roadmap with the next milestones for the CNCF Flux project. As for the Flux Operator and enterprise roadmap, this year we plan to release our top customer feature requests including ephemeral environments for reviewing pull requests, Kubernetes self-service namespaces, and much more. The project is open to feedback and suggestions.

Our events schedule focuses on amplifying the progress we’ve made, talking to end users, and sharing the future vision for Flux. In February, ControlPlane is sponsoring State of Open Con in London, one of the UK’s premier open source and cloud native events, and will be at FOSDEM, Europe’s biggest open source community gathering, in Brussels.

March brings KCD Brazil, April KubeCon EU, and then in May KCD Texas. Throughout 2025 we will sponsor and participate in various conferences and events — from community-driven gatherings to private sector forums — to share insights, foster collaboration, and demonstrate Flux’s potential as the trusted GitOps solution for enterprises. And we are exploring the possibility of bootstrapping a major Flux-only dedicated event, so stay tuned to our blog and LinkedIn for updates on our event schedule, ways to get involved, and how we’re supporting the open source community. We’re committed to creating meaningful opportunities to connect with adopters, contributors, and decision-makers alike.

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Organisations can improve their GitOps workflows with the enhanced delivery and security features ControlPlane Enterprise offers for Flux. To understand how we manage complex cloud native deployments and streamline operations at scale, contact [email protected].