What is GitOps?
Definition, the four Commandments of GitOps, reasons to implement GitOps, and GitOps Tools.
What is GitOps?
GitOps refers to a set of practices and tools that rely on Git as the central source of truth for managing software applications and infrastructure. It is an operational framework based on DevOps practices, like continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and version control, which automates infrastructure and manages software deployment.
The four Commandments of GitOps
- Git for Everything
GitOps extends the practice of using Git for the source code of an application to the application’s configuration, infrastructure, and operational procedures. It stores every aspect of a project’s infrastructure, including infrastructure as code files, configuration files, and application code files, in Git repositories, making it easy to manage software deployment and infrastructure provisioning. - V for Versioning
Declarative descriptions stored within the repository supports immutability, versioning, and versioning history. For example, using Git for the declarations mentioned above, allows you a single place from which everything for your application is derived and driven. This allows you to easily pinpoint any changes made at any time. - Auto-Pull
Using GitOps means that you employ software agents that are always running in the cluster, automatically pulling Git state at regular intervals and checking it against the live cluster state. This way you always know if the version in Git is the same as the live state or not. - Loop the Loop
Operating in a close loop ensuring the desired state of a system matches the declared state. This is one of the most important features because it provides feedback allowing you and your team to better control your operations and workflow.
DevOps vs. GitOps
DevOps is a collaborative approach to performing tasks by development and operations teams. While DevOps is a general philosophy of how teams should work, GitOps is a way to effectively implement DevOps. It is a method that depends on a specific tool for source control (Git) and is more goal-oriented.
GitOps uses Git to verify and deploy infrastructure changes automatically. It handles operations with a declarative approach — DevOps involves prescriptive and declarative approaches. DevOps can apply to any infrastructure, not just containers.
Reasons to implement GitOps
Reliability
GitOps allows you to revert/rollback changes with a click of a button. You can experiment with new features quickly and undo them in case of your code’s unexpected behavior. It also increases productivity levels while being reliable and secure.
Faster time to market
In a DevOps environment, faster deployments are a default requirement. However, GitOps takes it to the next level as deployments happen right within the source code. As code is developed and pushed to Git, it is automatically deployed using the same deployment tools. The fact that you don’t have to switch tools makes this process faster and better.
Easy Auditing
In a GitOps environment, every change is made via the repository. This enables you to check the branch history at any given point in time to see the complete deployment history and the history of each change made to the code. The free audit trail feature essentially simplifies auditing tasks. Every team member can check the Git repo and be updated with what’s happening across the development lifecycle. It also makes your auditing tasks easy.
Improved Developer Experience
GitOps is highly developer-focused. With the ability of working with developer-side tools such as Git, developers have command over deployment infrastructure and can easily manage and monitor deployments. The continuous feedback loops help them to identify errors, make changes and push code to production more frequently. They can use a single set of tools across the infrastructure.
GitOps Tools
Here are some of the tools that enable you to build a resilient GitOps environment:
Git
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
Helm
Helm is a tool that automates the creation, packaging, configuration, and deployment of Kubernetes applications by combining your configuration files into a single reusable package. In a microservice architecture, you create more microservices as the application grows, making it increasingly difficult to manage.
Flux
Flux is an open-source tool for automating application delivery pipelines to Kubernetes clusters based on GitOps principles. Flux makes use of source control platforms such as Git to allow users to describe their desired application state. It was originally created by Weaveworks but has recently been open-sourced.
Flagger
Flagger is a progressive delivery tool that automates the release process for applications running on Kubernetes. It reduces the risk of introducing a new software version in production by gradually shifting traffic to the new version while measuring metrics and running conformance tests.
Conclusion
GitOps is an incredibly powerful workflow pattern for managing modern cloud infrastructure. GitOps can bring many benefits to an engineering team including improved communication, visibility, stability, and system reliability.
