What is GitOps?

In the complex environment of modern software development, efficiency and dependability are critical to success. GitOps emerges as a light of innovation, enabling a paradigm shift in deployment procedures that is intimately aligned with DevOps principles. Let’s take a technical trip to understand GitOps and its practical applications.

GitOps transforms the deployment process by orchestrating infrastructure and application modifications using Git repositories. GitOps is based on four basic pillars:

1. Declarative Infrastructure as Code (IaC): GitOps supports the concept of declarative IaC, which expresses infrastructure configurations as code in Git repositories. This technique assures consistency, repeatability, and traceability because the desired state of the infrastructure is well defined and versioned.

2. Continuous Integration/Deployment (CI/CD) Pipelines: GitOps uses CI/CD pipelines to automate the deployment process. Changes to the Git repository initiate automated workflows for building, testing, and deploying apps and infrastructure changes, enhancing agility and eliminating manual involvement.

3. Git is the single source of truth in GitOps procedures. All configuration changes, including infrastructure modifications and application upgrades, are managed using Git, which serves as a centralized and auditable repository for collaboration and version control.

4. Observability and Monitoring: GitOps prioritizes observability and monitoring throughout the deployment process. Integrating with monitoring tools and employing Git-based workflows allows teams to gain visibility into changes, track performance metrics, and effectively troubleshoot issues, maintaining system reliability and stability.

Implementing GitOps: 1. Infrastructure Management with Terraform and GitOps
Terraform, a popular infrastructure provisioning tool, smoothly integrates into GitOps operations.
Infrastructure settings are defined using Terraform code and saved in Git repositories.
GitOps automation instructs Terraform to apply changes, assuring infrastructure consistency and stability.

2. Use Flux and ArgoCD for Kubernetes orchestration.
Kubernetes manifests are maintained in Git repositories, which allows teams to manage deployments, changes, and rollbacks using Git commits.
GitOps controllers continuously monitor Git repositories to ensure Kubernetes clusters retain the required state as stated in the Git repository.

Helm, a package management for Kubernetes, enhances GitOps procedures for application deployment.
Helm charts, which represent application setups, are version controlled in Git repositories.
GitOps automation instructs Helm to deploy, update, or rollback programs based on changes in the Git repository, easing the release process and maintaining consistent behavior across environments.