Let’s say you’ve successfully scaled your application infrastructure. You use DevOps for rapid and collaborative software development and underlying application infrastructure scales to meet current demand through container orchestration like Kubernetes or HashiCorp Nomad. Writing and developing new code is going great…until it isn’t–until application configuration or other elements are thrown out of alignment, or until a radical need for reconfiguration arises, with no easy way to create an environment, or when a rollback to the previous state becomes a moment of sink or swim, etc.
Automation declarative infrastructure development and configuration not only makes it easier to quickly ship code with amazing new features and improvements, but also mitigates drift conflicts and maintains control over condition of the development environment. While cloud-native applications are built to run in fluid and dynamic cloud environments, this is where GitOps really shines.
What is GitOps?
GitOps is more than just another buzzword that has pushed its way into the very crowded software development space. GitOps is an operational framework that aims to streamline and automate the development and management of applications and infrastructure using Git as the single source of truth. GitOps is quickly gaining popularity in the cloud native ecosystem, particularly in Kubernetes-based environments.
The hype surrounding GitOps may sound to some like a cushiony repackaging of DevOps. And if you already have a solid DevOps culture, what does GitOps bring to the table?
GitOps vs. DevOps
DevOps brings a set of best practices to software development life cycle–including version control, collaboration, compliance, CI/CD, logging, and monitoring–to develop and deliver quality applications. GitOps is a working application of these best practices for managing and automating your entire development environment.
GitOps leverages a version-controlled git repository as a single source of truth. CD conductors control the desired, declarative state of your cloud infrastructureand changes that are merged into the central repository trigger the mechanisms to enforce this state.
GitOps automates application code deployment and infrastructure management. Follow best practices by creating separate repos for your application code and configuration. Updates to app repository activation procedures with CI/CD tools to update configuration repository. Configuration changes are then pushed/pulled to the development environment.
A GitOps approach complements the speed and flexibility of cloud deployment. Iterative processes and unified development methodologies allow teams to work asynchronously without sacrificing collaboration – this is key to getting stable and scalable products to market faster.
Advantages of GitOps
Benefits of using a GitOps approach include:
- Operational efficiency. Automating the testing and development of all aspects of your infrastructure significantly reduces the cost and time spent on engineers performing manual and/or repetitive tasks. Teams are able to accelerate the development of bug fixes or new features. Less time spent directly managing infrastructure frees up time to focus on monitoring and optimization.
- Better collaboration: Development, Operations, and DevOps teams all use the same familiar interface (git repositories) and leverage the same processes for peer review and merging pull requests. A unified approach to development and the CI/CD process allows these teams to work together more closely and efficiently, all while adhering to the same best practices.
- Reliability: GitOps automation significantly reduces the risks and impact of human error, as errors are caught in the CI test pipeline before they are deployed to selected environments. In the event of an incident, a major advantage of a version controlled state is the ability to quickly roll back to a previous stable version.
- Tighter security: In a push-based approach, only the automation tool needs write access to the environment. In a pull-based approach, the environment just needs read access to the git repository. This greatly reduces the attack surface and eliminates the need for most individuals and/or groups to have direct access to the environment.
- Compliance and control: A git repository as a single interface for all changes makes it easy to implement policy as code programmatically to ensure that the infrastructure continually meets compliance standards. Version control simplifies auditing with a readily available and documented history of the entire repository.
- Automated deployment of multiple environments. Some common and highly recommended deployment strategies include having separate development, staging, and production environments, blue/green deployments, multi-cloud and/or multi-region deployments. This can be a cumbersome, time-consuming and error-prone process to do manually. A GitOps approach provides a faster and more stable method for deploying these multiple environments.
Would you like to know more? Download our eBook Understanding GitOps to understand the basics of GitOps and consider your implementation strategy.
