A few months ago I found myself delving into the realm of GitOps through my studies and some work experiences. GitOps is a transformative trend in the IT industry that’s reshaping the way we handle and think about infrastructure management. GitOps comes with powerful advantages and streamlining the way we handle and think about continous deployment and infrastructure. Today I’m going to breakdown this game-changing approach and share with you some of the knowledge I’ve gathered during my exploration of GitOps.

Understanding GitOps

First coined by Weaveworks in 2017, GitOps is an operating model that marries the best practices of DevOps with version control, collaboration, and automation. At its core, GitOps leverages Git as the single source of truth to declaratively define the desired state of your entire system. This allows for seamless infrastructure and application management, fostering a more developer-centric experience. By integrating Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) tools, GitOps empowers teams to achieve faster and more reliable software deployment.

Key Benefits

  • Developer-Centric Workflow: With GitOps, developers can self-serve and collaborate effortlessly with operations teams. Familiar Git workflows and pull requests make application management easy. Developers can define the infrastructure they need in code and submit it as a pull request, which, after proper review, gets automatically merged and applied to the live system. This process empowers developers, streamlining the path from code to deployment.

  • Configuration Drift Detection and Correction: Configuration drift occurs when the actual state of your infrastructure deviates from the desired state defined in the code. GitOps continuously monitors desired and working states, automatically rectifying any disparities to ensure your infrastructure aligns with the desired state. This proactive approach reduces manual interventions and enhances system stability and security.

  • Environment Versioning: In traditional approaches, managing different environments (e.g., development, staging, production) can be challenging. However, with GitOps, each commit in Git represents a version of your entire system, making it easier to manage environments separately from application code. This versioning mechanism ensures consistent and reproducible deployments across various environments.

  • Infrastructure Rollback and Restoration: Mistakes can happen during deployments, leading to disruptions or downtime. GitOps makes it easier to recover from such incidents by allowing operators to revert commits and restore the previous infrastructure state quickly. Moreover, GitOps operators can automatically recover the system in case of disasters or failures, ensuring high availability and resilience.

  • Enhanced Security: In the pull-based workflow, sensitive access keys are kept solely in the operator, reducing the need for direct access to production systems. This approach improves security by limiting access to critical credentials, making it harder for unauthorized users to compromise the system.

Principles & Practices of GitOps

To fully embrace GitOps, it’s essential to understand and adopt its core principles and best practices:

  1. Declarative Desired State: GitOps relies on declarative Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to describe the desired state of the system. Declarative IaC means that the code defines what the infrastructure should look like, rather than prescribing the steps to get there. This approach allows for idempotent updates and explicit version pinning, ensuring reproducibility and verifiability.

  2. Version Control as the Source of Truth: The desired state is stored in a version control system (typically Git), serving as the single source of truth for the entire system. This approach enhances collaboration, auditability, and change management, as all modifications are tracked and attributed to specific commits.

  3. Automatic Application of Desired State: GitOps ensures that any differences between the desired and working states are automatically observed and rectified. Automated reconciliation mechanisms guarantee that the system continuously converges to the declared state.

  4. Immutable and Versioned Artefacts: GitOps advocates using immutable and versioned artefacts (e.g. container images, machine images) to maintain a reproducible, verifiable and recoverable desired state. Immutable artifacts help eliminate configuration drift and simplify rollbacks by enabling operators to revert to known-good versions.

  5. Separation of Application and Environment Repositories: Best practice involves keeping application code and environment configuration in separate repositories, enabling more controlled access and easier dependency management. This separation prevents accidental changes to critical environment settings and improves the overall clarity of the version control history.

  6. Workflows: Push and Pull: GitOps offers two common workflows - push and pull. While both share similarities, the pull-based workflow, powered by operators, offers additional advantages, such as continuous observation and correction of configuration drift.

Push-Based Workflow

In the push-based workflow, a common CI system triggers a delivery process when changes are made to the application repository. The CI system performs various CI steps, including linting, testing, and building a container image. The final step involves updating the environment repository to specify the new artifact version in the desired state which then triggers its own CI process to update the live system. This workflow is great for getting started with GitOps, but it may require additional manual intervention for certain updates.

Push-based workflow diagram

Pull-Based Workflow

In the pull-based workflow, the deployment process is initiated through a pull process. The GitOps operator, responsible for continuous deployment, continually compares the desired state (stored in the environment repository) with the working state (live system). When differences are found, the operator automatically applies the desired state to the system. This workflow enables automatic resolution of configuration drift and makes it easier to manage sensitive access keys securely.

Pull-based workflow diagram

Challenges and Future Outlook

While GitOps has primarily been applied within Kubernetes environments, its principles and practices extend far beyond this platform. The challenge lies in expanding GitOps to other systems and workloads, necessitating further research and improved tooling. Currently, most GitOps tools cater to Kubernetes-centric setups such as ArgoCD or Flux. However, efforts are being made to create more versatile and platform-agnostic solutions that can be applied to a broader range of platforms.

Conclusion

GitOps is undoubtedly a game-changer in the realm of infrastructure management. By leveraging Git as the single source of truth and adhering to its guiding principles, teams can achieve faster, more reliable, and developer-friendly workflows. While Kubernetes has been the primary focus, the potential for GitOps to transcend this ecosystem is exciting to look towards.

So, let’s embrace the power of GitOps and unlock the full potential of our IT operations! By adopting GitOps, you can transform your infrastructure management and make continuous deployment and automation the cornerstone of your organization’s success. As the technology landscape continues to evolve, GitOps will undoubtedly play a big role in shaping the future of DevOps and infrastructure management.