Tackling Configuration Management at Scale with Flux, CUE and OCI at Cisco - Alec Hothan, Cisco & Stefan Prodan

The Cisco IoT platform manages 245M+ IoT devices on a large number of Kubernetes clusters deployed globally with GitOps and Flux. Configuration management at this scale poses challenges for any CD solution. This talk explores Cisco's approach using open-source tools like Flux, Helm, OCI, CUE and Timoni. Alec Hothan discusses their GitOps implementation using a 3-tier Git repository layout, how CUE integrates with Flux to validate configuration and secret management across Git repositories/Vaults and how this helps scale Flux-managed Helm releases across fleets of clusters while fostering collaboration between devs, test, build, release and SRE teams. Flux core maintainer, Stefan Prodan, explains how leveraging OCI artifacts mitigates the complexity and limitations in managing Git repository layers and introduces Timoni, a Kubernetes package manager combining CUE's features for robust deployments.