How do you define gitops and what are its benefits for DevOps?

This question has been answered definitively by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's GitOps Working Group. This working group has defined a clear and canonical standard, OpenGitOps. This definition was the product of a lot of work by the CNCF, and I reject any alternative definition. I understand that people don't like how opinionated and prescriptive this definition is, but that just means GitOps is not for everyone. We shouldn't dumb the definition down, despite the enormous pressure (often by self-interested tool vendors) to do so.

Before considering GitOps - take a lookwhat situation you have at the moment with cicd and iac in your project, gitops won't solve it for you. But it's very hyped approach, that has many ups and downs. Make sure to have a good base before taking look into it

Basically, GitOps uses Git as the source of truth for infrastructure and application configurations. Changes made in Git trigger automated workflows to update the live system, ensuring that the system state matches the desired state defined in the Git repository. This approach simplifies operations, enhances traceability, and promotes collaboration among teams.

There are basically two GitOps approaches. 👉 The Push Approach: This is more closer to your classic CD pipeline approach that is automated. Whenever a change happens in the Git repo, the CD pipeline triggers and pushes the changes to the target environment. 👉 The Pull Approach: The pull approach has become a standard approach where tools like ArgoCD are used. Here, an agent keeps track of the changes happening in your Git repo, the desired state, and it automatically pulls changes to match the actual state of the system. I believe that GitOps is going to be the standard approach for software delivery in the coming days.

📍Manage and track infrastructure changes efficiently. 📍Define desired state, enhancing reproducibility and consistency. 📍Streamline and automate application deployment processes for efficiency. 📍 Facilitate teamwork and visibility into code and configurations. 📍Enable faster and reliable software delivery cycles.

According to me, these are some very useful benefits of adopting GitOps: 1. Streamlined Processes: It simplifies deployment, tracking changes, and managing configurations. 2. Consistency and Reliability: It ensures the system's reliability by maintaining a consistent state through version-controlled configurations. 3. Collaboration and Transparency: Facilitates collaboration among teams by using Git as a single source of truth, ensuring transparency in changes made. 4. Automated Operations: Automates deployment and management, enhancing efficiency and reducing manual errors. 5. Enhanced Security: Provides better security by enabling role-based access control.

In my experience, GitOps redefines team collaboration. The top 3 benefits of GitOps for enhancing DevOps workflows: 1. ENHANCED SECURITY & RELIABILITY With Git as the cornerstone, every change is transparent, traceable, and reversible, bolstered by Git’s inherent security mechanisms. 2. ACCELERATED DELIVERY GitOps minimizes manual errors and intervention, streamlining deployments and fostering quicker release cycles through automation. 3. BOOSTED COLLABORATION GitOps centralizes control within Git, improving coordination among team members and making the development process more cohesive and transparent. GitOps isn’t just a practice; it’s a transformation in how we approach DevOps.

GitOps takes the DevOps Engineer processes and applies them to the Infrastructure as Code (IaC). It combines Git and Operations (resource management). GitOps seeks to utilize the CI/CD processes to deploy our resources utilizing the code stored in our git Repositories.

I have found that GitOps is best implemented in containerized ecosystems such as Kubernetes. One of the biggest benefits of GitOps is quick configuration changes and quicker release cycles. Having almost everything automated makes it more streamlined and secure and easier to manage.

GitOps provides a single source of truth for your environment. Zero changes are made to the environment by hand. It's all driven by source control and automation. Every change can be traced back to a code commit.

GitOps is an operational framework that takes DevOps best practices used for application development such as version control, collaboration, compliance, and CI/CD, and applies them to infrastructure automation

Navigating the 3 key challenges of GitOps for DevOps teams: 1. MANAGING COMPLEXITY As infrastructure scales, careful organization and synchronization of Git repositories becomes paramount to avoid bottlenecks. 2. ENSURING SECURITY & PERFORMANCE Securing the GitOps pipeline against vulnerabilities and maintaining its performance demands a comprehensive strategy encompassing encryption, logging, and robust monitoring. 3. CULTIVATING A GITOPS CULTURE Shifting to a Git-centric workflow requires a mindset change across the team, underpinned by training and redefined processes, to fully leverage GitOps' advantages. Understanding these challenges is the first step towards unlocking the full potential of GitOps.

As devOps and GitOps matures as a service and software, dedicated human resources or engineers with knowledge of how to configure and work with these tools will become invaluable to organizations.

GitOps may be limiting when it comes to some automated tools and processes such as code scanning, container scanning and security issues. All aspects of the GitOps pipeline has to be closely monitored and strict compliance has to be adhered to. Scalability and migration of some platforms be an issue , as well as migrating from GitOps to another workflow may be challanging.

In GitOps, the infrastructure (i.e., the runtime environment) and the program definition coexist. Given the significance of each character in this context, it's not a mere plaything; it's akin to developers' source code. Deploying it requires steps as stringent, if not more so, than the code it aims to run. Similar functions, such as analysis, testing, and SecOps, need to be identified just like with other developers in the project. We must adhere to the same expectations as the other participants in the development process (we introduce, possibly conceive, and adhere to the same standards... really?). From this point on, our work becomes faster, more transparent, and simpler than before. 😄

GitOps best practices include using version-controlled infrastructure, defining desired states declaratively, relying on Git for configurations, automating CI/CD pipelines, ensuring automated rollbacks, prioritizing monitoring, and integrating security measures. These practices streamline collaboration, enhance reliability, and maintain system scalability.

Git is suggested for maintaining compliance by recording every change to infrastructure and application code through audit trails. Why? Based on my experience with banking institutions using GitOps for compliance, tracking all changes to the production environment, including configurations and deployments, and providing a transparent audit trail is among the most important aspect of having GitOps within the system.

In my experience, GitOps is an awesome approach that provides lots of benefits. But unfortunately, it's not the case of one size fits all. There is always a temptation to unify the approach and uniformly do everything, but it is important to keep perspective and understand that the solution should not add more problems/hurdles than it solves.

GitOps is like having an assistant who constantly compares the state of your product with what you agreed upon while also giving you audit logging. Its not only having everything written down in git that counts, but its the fact that changes are visible to everyone easily and alerting can be instrumented to the dot. If you leverage approval processes in your org, gitops was made for you.

Integrating GitOps with legacy systems is a challenge that is often overlooked. The reason being that legacy systems have their own set of processes and technologies that are not inherently compatible with the GitOps model. To bridge the gap between old and new, innovative solutions and sometimes bespoke adaptations are required. Addressing the challenge of integrating GitOps with legacy systems involves a mix of technical innovation, strategic planning, and organizational flexibility.

It's crucial to note that GitOps doesn't solely consist of our Git repository stack but also includes the operational code! In theory, developers are supposed to keep an eye on it, but as everyone knows, theory and practice theoretically differ. I don't think GitOps is suitable for everyone who doesn't peek under the hood, establish an adequate control system, either criticizing GitOps/themselves, or forming it properly. Therefore, the development of GitOps should also have at least main/devel/release branches.