Everything you need to know about GitOps!

The term GitOps was coined by developers at Weaveworks when they posted a blog defining Git as “the source of truth”. Git is a part of almost every CI/CD assembly and they decided to leverage the exact thing. They explained how one can use Git to simplify Kubernetes cluster management and application delivery. So, in simple words, GitOps means using Git as a single source of truth and a place to create, operate and destroy all your environmental needs for declarative infrastructure and applications. It means making everything Git-driven and using Git to operate almost everything from code reposition, version control, review, history tracking & auditing, test, deploy, rollback, roll-forward, and updates. This means that we don’t need to use tools like kubectl for such operations. All this can be done using Git and by pull requests along with tools that can be synced with the pipeline for convergence. It is like controlling your infrastructure through code, in some aspects. This might create confusion between GitOps and Infrastructure as Code. So, before jumping on to the tools that can elevate your GitOps, let’s talk about IaC and GitOps first.

IaC vs GitOps

IaC has indeed reduced a lot of efforts that were needed previously to manage infrastructure. However, Infrastructure as Code doesn’t help you manage the entire cloud-native stack. GitOps can help you deal with almost all the possible avenues. Besides, GitOps can help you leverage containers with the best orchestrator available out there i.e. Kubernetes. Furthermore, GitOps is a much-simplified approach because only Git is in control of most of the things. On the contrary, in IaC it may change as and when required. This augments the overall synchronization, efficiency, and security which brings me to the next point benefits of GitOps.

Benefits of GitOps

Enhanced security, high productivity, reduced downtime, and consistency are among the major benefits that come with GitOps. Let’s see how GitOps helps in improving the aforementioned aspects.

Enhanced security

Security is the most important aspect in any environment and GitOps can help to bolster application and system security in a whole new way. As Git is going to be the single source of truth, the credentials always remain within the cluster. Adopting GitOps makes software releases highly automated, further strengthening the overall security because of the reduced human interventions. Strong cryptography, administration & tracking, and ability to recover using the config Git repository instead of re-running build pipelines are some of the augmentations that can help in enhancing security.

Increased productivity

Organizations that have implemented GitOps in the right manner, have seen their development outputs surge by a considerable number. Git can efficiently manage features and updates for Kubernetes, because of the self-declarative nature. It also provides efficient means of testing and deploying applications running on Kubernetes. When it comes to complex application management tasks, using GitOps with Kubernetes provides several advantages such as a high level of security, simple & precise workflows, efficient cluster management, ease of deployment, reusability across environments, and others. Continuous deployment automation with an integrated feedback control loop reduces the deployment time thereby increasing the overall development output. Plus, familiarity with Git makes it easy for developers to manage updates and feature enhancements.

Reduced downtime

With GitOps, you can have consistent end-to-end workflows in which all your CI/CD pipeline operations are reproducible. Another notable feature of Git is its revert/rollback and fork option. With this, you can easily recover from meltdowns, which in turn, improves system reliability. It also empowers you with better cluster auditing capabilities even outside Kubernetes.

Any technology or a software practice is only as good as its associated tools make it, which brings us to the …read more