DevOps has become a digital transformation strategy for many organizations. It's about software development and operations teams working together and engineering and automating their practices. This will lead to writing code for small changes and testing and implementing those small changes very quickly. This was an amazing step forward and wonderful software practice.
Why Need GitOps?
But now, in the modern environment, we face even more challenges. We need software applications that work at staggeringly large web scale and deal with microservices, containerization, and service mesh. In this modern world of containers and Kubernetes, applications need to scale infrastructure that runs when load is high. And when there is no load, you have to scale back and do all of this dynamically in a very complex way across many applications and microservices.
To address these modern operational challenges, GitOps comes into play. Before I talk about GitOps, let me briefly tell you what Git is and what Ops is.
Git is a distributed version control system where we manage our source code. It can have text, certificate, or configuration files. We maintain all these files using Git and we also use it to collaborate with different team members.
The term operations comes from the same term as DevOps, where we used to launch, deploy, operate, and monitor applications as part of operations.
What is GitOps?
GitOps is a process used for continuous deployment of a cloud-native application. This process is developer-centric, using a developer-friendly repo like Git for the operational infrastructure. Git here is the single source of information for all application and infrastructure deployment automation.
It is an operational framework and takes the DevOps best practices used for application development. These are version control, collaboration, compliance, CI/CD, and you apply them for infrastructure automation. In a nutshell, GitOps has three main components.
It is a combination of infrastructure as code (IAC), merge requests as its agent of change, and CI/CD automation.
Benefits of GitOps:
- Better developer experience: Help developers use a very familiar tool like Git to easily manage Kubernetes without even knowing its internal details. It also increases the productivity of newly onboarded developers.
- Reliable: With the help of features in Git, such as rollback, it is easy to revert to a stable version in the event of any crash, drastically reducing recovery time.
- Consistent: GitOps end-to-end workflow is very consistent as an infrastructure; one model provides application, Kubernetes management, everything.
- Faster Deployment: Helps you deploy applications faster than ever before by integrating continuous deployment automation with a feedback control loop.
- Self-documenting environments: You can get a complete history of every change in the system and all the details of what was deployed by looking at the master branch. It helps to facilitate collaboration with other teams or share enough knowledge with a new member.
- Security and compliance: GitOps helps large organizations stay secure and compliant. You can block the permissions of people who actually have permission to merge into a branch.
GitOps Pipeline example:
- First, the user changes the code in the Git repository.
- A container image is then created and pushed to the container registry.
- It is updated in a configuration updater.
- Once a user creates a pull request to merge into a different branch, it is deployed to the branch in question.
- Then test if everything is ok or not.
- Once everything is ok, the reviewer will be able to merge it.
- After the merge, move to the test branch.
- Once you create a pull request, it will be deployed to that test branch.