Let’s say that you just’ve efficiently scaled your software infrastructure. You’re utilizing DevOps for fast and collaborative software program improvement, and underlying software infrastructure scales to satisfy present demand by way of container orchestration like Kubernetes or HashiCorp Nomad. Writing and deploying new code goes nice…till it isn’t–till the appliance configuration or different elements have drifted from alignment, or till a radical want for refactoring turns into current, with no simple technique to recreate an atmosphere, or when a rollback to earlier state turns into a sink or swim second, and so forth.

Automating declarative infrastructure deployment and configuration not solely makes it simpler to rapidly ship code with gorgeous new options and enhancements, but in addition alleviates the conflicts of drift, and maintains management of the state of the deployment atmosphere. Whereas cloud-native purposes are constructed to run in fluid and dynamic cloud environments, that is the place GitOps actually shines.

What’s GitOps?

GitOps is extra than simply one other buzzword that has pushed its manner into the very crowded software program improvement house. GitOps is an operational framework that goals to streamline and automate the deployment and administration of purposes and infrastructure utilizing Git as the only supply of fact. GitOps is quickly gaining recognition within the cloud-native ecosystem, significantly in Kubernetes-based environments.

The hype round GitOps could sound to some, like a pillowy repackaging of DevOps. And if you have already got a stable DevOps tradition in place, what does GitOps deliver to the desk?

GitOps vs. DevOps

DevOps brings a set finest practices to the software program improvement lifecycle–together with model management, collaboration, compliance, CI/CD, logging and monitoring–for creating and delivering high quality purposes. GitOps is an operational implementation of those finest practices for managing and automating your complete deployment atmosphere.

GitOps leverages a version-controlled git repository as a single supply of fact. CD pipelines management the specified, declarative state of your cloud infrastructure, and adjustments merged into the central repository set off the mechanisms to implement that state.

GitOps automates software code deployments and infrastructure administration. Adhere to finest practices by creating separate repos in your software code, and configs. Updates to the appliance repo set off processes together with your CI/CD tooling to replace the config repo. The config adjustments are then pushed/pulled to the deployment atmosphere.

A GitOps strategy enhances the rapidity and suppleness of cloud-native improvement. Repeatable processes and unified deployment methodologies enable groups to work asynchronously with out sacrificing collaboration– that is the important thing to bringing secure and scalable merchandise to market sooner.

Advantages of GitOps

The advantages of utilizing a GitOps strategy embrace:

• Operational effectivity. Automating the testing and deployment of all features of your infrastructure vastly reduces the associated fee and time spent on engineers performing guide and/or repetitive duties. Groups are in a position to pace up the event of bug fixes or new options. Much less time spent on straight managing infrastructure offers time again to deal with monitoring and optimization.

• Higher collaboration: Improvement, Operations, and DevOps groups all use the identical acquainted interface (git repositories) and leverage the identical procedures for peer evaluate and merging of pull requests. A unified strategy to deployment and CI/CD course of allows these groups to work collectively extra carefully and effectively, all whereas adhering to the identical finest practices.

• Reliability: GitOps automation vastly reduces the dangers of and impression of human error since errors are caught within the CI testing pipeline earlier than they’re deployed into chosen environments. Ought to an incident happen, a serious benefit of a model managed state, is the power of fast rollback to a earlier secure model.

• Tighter safety: In a push-based strategy, solely the automation tooling wants write entry to the atmosphere. In a pull-based strategy, the atmosphere simply wants learn entry to the git repository. This vastly reduces the assault floor and eliminates the necessity for most people and/or groups to have any direct entry to the atmosphere.

• Compliance and auditing: A git repository as the only interface for all adjustments makes it simple to programmatically implement coverage as code to make sure that infrastructure frequently meets compliance requirements. Model management simplifies auditing with a available and documented historical past of your complete repository.
• Automated deployment of a number of environments. Some widespread and strongly really helpful deployment methods embrace having separate dev, staging, and manufacturing environments, blue/inexperienced deployments, multi-cloud and/or multi-region deployments. This is usually a cumbersome, time consuming, and error-prone course of to do manually. A GitOps strategy gives a sooner and secure methodology for deploying these a number of environments.

Wish to be taught extra? Obtain our Understanding GitOps book to grasp the important rules of GitOps and think about your implementation technique.