GitOps is a paradigm that helps automate application deployment and infrastructure provisioning. It typically involves using Git, an open-source version control system, as a single source of truth for declarative infrastructure and applications. In this blog post, we will explore what GitOps is, what are its benefits, how to implement it, and what are some real-world use cases.
GitOps is a method used for continuous delivery. It uses Git as a single source of truth for infrastructures like declarative infrastructure and applications. On Git, set delivery pipelines, make pull requests, and accelerate and simplify both the application deployments and the operations task to Kubernetes. By using Git, create new features in the Applications rather than focusing on operations tasks.
GitOps is based on four core principles:
- Declarative configuration: You define the desired state of your system in manifests (e.g., YAML files) within a Git repository.
- Git as the single source of truth: All configuration changes happen through pull requests in Git, ensuring collaboration and traceability.
- Automated reconciliation: Tools like ArgoCD or Flux continuously compare the desired state with the actual state and automatically reconcile any discrepancies.
- Self-healing infrastructure: If the system deviates from the desired state, tools automatically bring it back into compliance.
GitOps brings several benefits to DevOps teams, such as:
- Efficiency: Streamlined deployments and reduced manual configuration errors.
- Reliability: Ensures consistent configurations and self-healing capabilities.
- Flexibility: Customizable deployments and workflows adapting to diverse needs.
- Security: Improved security through Git’s access control and auditability.
- Scalability: Supports large-scale deployments and multi-cluster management.
GitOps is not a specific tool or platform, but rather a set of practices and patterns that can be applied to different scenarios. However, some common steps to implement GitOps are:
- Set up your Git repository: This is where you store your infrastructure and application configuration files, as well as your deployment scripts and pipelines. You can use any Git hosting service, such as GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket.
- Configure your deployment scripts: These are the scripts that define how to deploy your applications and infrastructure to your target environments, such as Kubernetes clusters. You can use any configuration management or templating tool, such as Helm, Kustomize, Terraform, or Ansible.
- Set up a GitOps tool: This is the tool that monitors your Git repository and triggers the deployment scripts when there are changes. You can use any GitOps tool that supports your infrastructure and application platforms, such as ArgoCD, Flux, Jenkins X, or Codefresh.
- Deploy your application: Once you have everything set up, you can deploy your application by making changes to your configuration files in Git and creating pull requests. Your GitOps tool will automatically apply the changes to your target environments and keep them in sync with your Git repository.
GitOps is widely used by organizations that need to manage complex and dynamic cloud-native applications and infrastructure. Some examples of real-world use cases are:
- Disaster recovery: Restore your system to a working state in minutes by using Git as a backup and recovery mechanism. You can easily roll back to a previous commit or branch if your system is compromised or corrupted.
- Compliance and governance: Ensure that your system meets the regulatory and security standards by enforcing policies and rules through Git. You can use tools like Open Policy Agent or Kyverno to validate and mutate your configurations before applying them.
- Edge computing: Deploy and manage applications across distributed edge devices and clusters with GitOps. You can use tools like K3s or MicroK8s to run lightweight Kubernetes clusters on the edge and sync them with your Git repository.
- Machine learning: Accelerate and simplify your machine learning workflows with GitOps. You can use tools like Kubeflow or MLflow to orchestrate your machine learning pipelines and experiments and track them with Git.
- Hybrid and multi-cloud: Manage applications across different cloud providers and platforms with GitOps. You can use tools like Crossplane or Anthos to abstract away the cloud-specific details and unify your deployments and operations with Git.
GitOps is a powerful framework that leverages Git for managing infrastructure and deployments. It simplifies continuous delivery, automates workflows, and ensures consistency across environments. GitOps is suitable for cloud-native applications and infrastructure and can be implemented with various tools and platforms. GitOps can help DevOps and SRE engineers to deliver software faster, safer, and easier.
