GitOps has emerged as a popular framework for implementing DevOps principles and improving deployment workflows. It focuses on using Git as the single source of truth for declaring infrastructure, configurations, and applications. By leveraging Git's version control capabilities, teams can collaborate on code to automate and manage environments more efficiently.
What is GitOps?
With GitOps, the desired state of infrastructure and apps is described in a Git repository as declarative code. Automated operators then ensure the current state matches the desired state in the repo. Some key aspects of GitOps include:
- Use of Git pull requests to trigger changes
- Automated promotion of code from dev to staging to production
- Self-healing when the current state drifts from the Git repo state
Infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform and configuration management tools like Ansible can be placed under Git version control to enable GitOps flows.
Benefits of GitOps for DevOps
Here are some top benefits of adopting GitOps practices:
- Collaboration - Developers, ops engineers, and other stakeholders can collaborate on Git repos to define infra and apps.
- Auditability - Git commit history provides audit trail for changes.
- Promotion - Code is automatically promoted via PRs along the pipeline.
- Compliance - Git history makes it easier to meet compliance requirements.
- Resiliency - Systems auto-heal drift from desired Git state.
- Tool flexibility - GitOps works with many IaC, config management, and CI/CD tools.
Implementing GitOps
There are several steps to implement GitOps in an organization:
- Choose an infrastructure-as-code tool like Terraform to declare infrastructure
- Create Git repositories to store IaC scripts and app config YAML/JSON files
- Setup CI/CD pipelines to test changes and auto-deploy on commit
- Use Git hooks to enforce policies like linting, security checks, etc
- Monitor systems and roll back or auto-remediate drift from the desired state
GitOps takes DevOps to the next level by leveraging Git to define the desired state. It offers a single source of truth for the entire IT environment. Teams gain increased collaboration, compliance, speed, and resiliency.
