kapp VS Flux

Compare kapp vs Flux and see what are their differences.

kapp

kapp is a simple deployment tool focused on the concept of "Kubernetes application" — a set of resources with the same label (by carvel-dev)
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kapp Flux
7 12
859 6,956
1.5% -
8.1 7.6
9 days ago over 1 year ago
Go Go
Apache License 2.0 Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

kapp

Posts with mentions or reviews of kapp. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-07-28.
  • HELM vs KUSTOMIZE
    8 projects | /r/kubernetes | 28 Jul 2022
  • How to handle the lifecycle of multiple COTS
    3 projects | /r/kubernetes | 27 Jul 2022
    If you want to take it one step further: you might be applying several resources at a time that are logically one "application". kapp (https://carvel.dev/kapp/) lets you group those together and give them a name, and provides a "terraform-like" experience where it shows you its execution plan before applying updates. So then you might do `ytt -f | kapp deploy -a name-of-thing` Or you could use helm's templating engine but then still pass the resulting yaml to kapp for its unification of the deployment step.
  • Dhall: A Gateway Drug to Haskell
    27 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Jun 2022
    since you mentioned Kubernetes...

    > It would be nice if there was a separate state reconciliation system that one could adapt to use with Cue or Dhall or any other frontend

    this exactly was thinking behind https://carvel.dev/kapp for Kubernetes (i'm one of the maintainers). it makes a point to not know how you decided to generate your Kubernetes config -- just takes it as input.

    > In particular the ability to import other files as semantic hashes seems like a great feature.

    it's an interesting feature but seems like it should be unnecessary given that config can be easily checked into git (your own and its dependencies).

  • Terraform should have remained stateless
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 May 2022
    i think kubernetes is not a great example in favor of more client state (like tf) since k8s has uniform resource structure (metadata.*) and first class labeling support. but as you point out kubectl doesnt use labels well (at least imho).

    when building https://carvel.dev/kapp (which i think of as "optimized terraform" for k8s) the goal was absolutely to take advantage of those k8s features. we ended up providing two capabilities: direct label (more advanced) and "app name" (more user friendly). from impl standpoint, difference is how much state is maintained.

    "kapp deploy -a label:x=y -f ..." allows user to specify label that is applied to all deployed resources and is also used for querying k8s to determine whats out there under given label. invocation is completely stateless since burden of keeping/providing state (in this case the label x=y) is shifted to the user. downside of course is that all apis within k8s need to be iterated over. (side note, fun features like "kapp delete -a label:!x" are free thanks to k8s querying).

    "kapp deploy -a my-app -f ..." gives user ability to associate name with uniquely auto-generated label. this case is more stateful than previous but again only label needs to be saved (we use ConfigMap to store that label). if this state is lost, one has to only recover generated label.

    imho k8s api structure enables focused tools like kapp to be much much simpler than more generic tool like terraform. as much as i'd like for terraform to keep less state, i totally appreciate its needs to support lowest common denominator feature set.

    common discussion topics:

  • Is there any CLI tool to sync between local yamls and current cluster namespace state?
    1 project | /r/kubernetes | 19 Jul 2021
    Take a look at kapp (https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/carvel-kapp).
  • Deploy Neo4J's APOC plugin with code thanks to CARVEL vendir
    21 projects | dev.to | 4 Jul 2021
    kapp - Install, upgrade, and delete multiple Kubernetes resources as one "application"
  • Open Application Model – An open standard for defining cloud native apps
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Mar 2021
    I really like this approach for simplifying Kubernetes. A few projects similar to OAM in that it provides a higher level "Application" CRD:

    https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/carvel-kapp

Flux

Posts with mentions or reviews of Flux. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-05.
  • Weaveworks Is Shuting Down
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Feb 2024
    Right. Flux was a handy little tool[1] that sync'd yaml manifests in git repos to live clusters. The concept was fascinating, and the tool was well done--small and efficient. Easy to learn.

    In 2019, they announced they'd be "merging" with argocd[2]. It seems the merge never really took place, and after that they deprecated flux and announced flux2[3].

    The sudden changes of course were a little confusing and perhaps not too well communicated.

    1: https://github.com/fluxcd/flux

  • FluxCD - question on configuration/setup in namespaces...
    1 project | /r/kubernetes | 29 Jun 2022
    If you are looking at multiple instances of Flux on a cluster which is unmaintained, then most likely you are looking at Flux v1 which is the legacy version and users are all recommended to migrate to the new Flux v2 that has the feature of multiple git repositories and supporting to allow multiple syncs or even multiple tenants.
  • Interesting tools?
    30 projects | /r/kubernetes | 23 May 2022
    CI/CD: Tekton Flux
  • What You Should Know Before Setting Up Your First CI/CD Pipeline
    7 projects | dev.to | 18 May 2022
    Use ArgoCD or Flux for Kubernetes, and Serverless Stack for your serverless Lambda applications.
  • Top 200 Kubernetes Tools for DevOps Engineer Like You
    84 projects | dev.to | 15 Jan 2022
    HybridK8s Droid - Intelligence foor your favourite Delivery Platform Devtron - Software Delivery Workflow for Kubernetes Skaffold - Easy and Repeatable Kubernetes Development Apollo - Apollo - The logz.io continuous deployment solution over kubernetes Helm Cabin - Web UI that visualizes Helm releases in a Kubernetes cluster flagger - Progressive delivery Kubernetes operator (Canary, A/B Testing and Blue/Green deployments) Kubeform - Kubernetes CRDs for Terraform providers https://kubeform.com Spinnaker - Spinnaker is an open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform for releasing software changes with high velocity and confidence. http://www.spinnaker.io/ werf - GitOps tool to deliver apps to Kubernetes and integrate this process with GitLab and other CI tools Flux - GitOps Kubernetes operator Argo CD - Declarative continuous deployment for Kubernetes Tekton - A cloud native continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) solution Jenkins X - Jenkins X provides automated CI+CD for Kubernetes with Preview Environments on Pull Requests using Tekton, Knative, Lighthouse, Skaffold and Helm KubeVela - KubeVela works as an application delivery control plane that is fully decoupled from runtime infrastructure ksonnet - A CLI-supported framework that streamlines writing and deployment of Kubernetes configurations to multiple clusters CircleCI - A cloud-based tool that helps build continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines to Kubernetes.
  • Automatic subchart updating?
    1 project | /r/helm | 10 Nov 2021
    Does a tool like this exist? I am aware of the argoCD image updater which is similar but not quite what I’m looking for, and am aware that flux has an old feature request for this https://github.com/fluxcd/flux/issues/2711
  • Automation assistants: GitOps tools in comparison
    28 projects | dev.to | 12 Aug 2021
    The blog post by Weaveworks, which coined the term GitOps in 2017, also names the first GitOps operator: Flux. In the meantime, this has been completely rewritten as Flux v2. In addition to Flux and Flux v2, the associated project "Flux" develops other components. Weaveworks has now handed the project over to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). By now, the project is in the second maturity level: incubator phase.
  • Azure DevOps and GitOps
    1 project | /r/azuredevops | 9 Jul 2021
    Here's our GitHub for Weave Flux and an overview of GitOps
  • Open source Heroku Like Platform on premises
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Mar 2021
    Looks really neat. We have a not-super-trivial rails app that I want to move to docker one day, but kinda scared to make the jump. We're already using docker for development, plus even have a home-grown docker-compose setup for ephemeral labs, but it's clunky at best.

    This seems like something that might provide a simple jumping board hopefully... Also bumped into fluxCD[0] recently which also looks interesting.

    [0] https://github.com/fluxcd/flux

  • Kubernetes State Checker
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Mar 2021
    > It doesn't make all the other yaml files happen. It doesn't make the yaml files you no longer want happening, stop happening. It doesn't even tell you "these things were created by 'old' yaml files" and should be garbage collected (since it doesn't seem to have a sense of old yaml files).

    This is definitely one piece of Kubernetes that is getting a lot of attention recently. The three tools I've been paying attention to are Argo CD[0], Flux[1], and Config Sync[2].

    All of these allow you to point your repository to a cluster and sync resources from the repo to the cluster, including deletes.

    [0] https://argoproj.github.io/argo-cd/

    [1] https://github.com/fluxcd/flux

    [2] https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/add-on/confi...

    Disclaimer: I work at GCP, but not on the GKE team. Opinions are my own.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing kapp and Flux you can also consider the following projects:

kubevela - The Modern Application Platform.

fleet - Deploy workloads from Git to large fleets of Kubernetes clusters

argo-cd - Declarative Continuous Deployment for Kubernetes

kapp-controller - Continuous delivery and package management for Kubernetes.

keel - Kubernetes Operator to automate Helm, DaemonSet, StatefulSet & Deployment updates

ytt - YAML templating tool that works on YAML structure instead of text

vault-secrets-operator - Create Kubernetes secrets from Vault for a secure GitOps based workflow.

carvel - Carvel provides a set of reliable, single-purpose, composable tools that aid in your application building, configuration, and deployment to Kubernetes. This repo contains information regarding the Carvel open-source community.

kubernetes-external-secrets - Integrate external secret management systems with Kubernetes

terraform-provider-carvel - Carvel Terraform provider with resources for ytt and kapp to template and deploy to Kubernetes

argo-rollouts - Progressive Delivery for Kubernetes