All You Need to Know for GitOps Functionality

What is GitOps?

GitOps is a model developed to enable IT teams and developers to use Git for app delivery and managing clusters.

Git is a system that manages open-source distributed code and Version control. It is serves to keep companies up to date on changes in source code during software development. Git also manages content and includes pull requests related to GitOps. This enables users to inform others of changes pushed to a new branch in a repository using GitHub.

GitOps Principles

Define the whole system declaratively

Make the entire system definition in Git a Version

Automatically implement approved changes to the infrastructure

Use special automation agents to assure system convergence

GitOps Functionality

GitOps revolves around pull requests. On initiating a pull request, the user can check the overview of changes that occur in a branch repository base. A summary of reviewed and proposed changes and labels can be added and list other contributors. After creating a pull request, a commit from a topic branch can be included to the pull request where contributors can see any tabled changes. On approval of all the requests, the changes can then be merged with the pull request.

GitOps also uses other tools for Git pushes, development and continuous integration. Git and also CI servers can work with GitOps.

Uses of GitOps

GitOps offers a variety of applications. Apart from allowing an enterprise to push out applications more quickly, consistent implementation eliminates the requirement for individual deployment management systems.

Continuous delivery usually allows development teams to develop, test and implement software quicker through incremental updates. GitOps can help implement this. It enables an enterprise to utilize tools for managing infrastructure, allowing version control for alternations in configuration. It also has the ability to consistently keep track of alternations and issue updates.

Benefits of GitOps

Benefits of deploying GitOps include:

● Improvement in productivity by enabling consistent deployment and delivery
● High reliability due to revert and rollback features and fork features
● Allowing an enterprise to use one set of resources/tools
● Reduction in possible variables in managing infrastructure
● Improved visibility
● A clear change history

GitOps Demerits

A few downsides of GitOps include:

● Does not fix terrible practices
● Proliferation of repositories
● Not ideal for programmatic updates
● Does not offer help for secrets management
● Difficult to audit

GitOps vs. DevOps

GitOps and DevOps possess equally essential similarities and differences.

DevOps joins "development" and "operations" as one word. It's an approach to tasks performed by an organization's application development and IT operations teams in collaboration. The major purpose of DevOps includes but is not limited to promoting collaboration between development and operations teams. It also asks them to partner on automation, infrastructure deployment practices and programmable software development.

GitOps is an extension of DevOps, which uniquely leverages the tool Git. Its major goals are development process automation and speeding up release cadences, a goal also shared by DevOps. But GitOps is a method, while DevOps is cultural or philosophical. GitOps is restricted to Git usage while DevOps isn't restricted to only one tool.

Adding to Git as a key DevOps mechanism, GitOps is associated with tools that augment Gits default usage.

GitOps uses well-known and tested DevOps practices, including version control and CI/CD, and implements them to infrastructure automation. The central idea of GitOps is to place a Git repository at the center of infrastructure declarations and manage the present state and previous history of your application infrastructure with it.

Into the Future of GitOps

Many hold the opinion that GitOps could be the tomorrow of DevOps, the main reason being that GitOps is both a declarative and a cloud-native approach to managing configurations. GitOps is very helpful in cases requiring the use of version control to manage infrastructure and application deployment, which would otherwise be challenging.

Summarily

GitOps is a really advanced workflow pattern designed to manage modern cloud infrastructure. However, while mainly focused on cluster management, the DevOps family is also applying and publishing GitOps solutions to other systems. It offers a variety of benefits to an operations team, including enhanced communication, visibility, agility and system reliability. One of the main needs for a GitOps experience is a modern hosted Git platform.

Conclusion

When do you use the GitOps method? That depends on your current functionality. If you're experiencing clusters with little knowledge of how or where they're deployed, you should have started sooner.

Use Git to create an infrastructure representation

Start to sync infrastructure automatically with its representation