Introduction
Solutions that assist teams and companies in speeding up the process of continuous deployment in cloud environments are constantly improving as DevOps continues to gain more popularity. One of the tools that DevOps veterans and novice professionals all know and trust that is behind the growth of DevOps is Git.
Essentially, since 2017 when the GitOps movement to manage Kubernetes clusters began, there has been a considerable push for automation of software development. It reduces human error, improves the reliability of software deployment pipelines', and empowers DevOps folks to deploy more, gather better analytical data, and correct errors faster.
GitOps is quickly gaining popularity as a continuous deployment solution, offering full application and infrastructure management through a Git-based workflow. But on this road to (workflow) riches, organizations quickly encounter two hurdles impeding their GitOps adoption.
First, available GitOps tooling is overwhelmingly Kubernetes-centric. Aside from born-in-the-cloud companies, most organizations rely on a mix of technologies from on-prem and cloud VMs to Kubernetes. Using GitOps to define and deploy applications on Linux VMs is far different from doing so with Kubernetes, burdening developers with the complexity of managing those multiple pipelines. Second, no matter what infrastructure developers deploy applications to, GitOps lacks a centralized portal to help monitor and support those applications.
GitOps offers a way to automate and manage infrastructure. It does this by using the same DevOps best practices that many teams already use, such as version control, code review, and CI/CD pipelines.
Companies have been adopting DevOps because of its great potential to improve productivity and software quality. Along the way, we’ve found ways to automate the software development lifecycle. But when it comes to infrastructure setup and deployments, it’s still mostly a manual process.
GitOps is an operational framework that leverages DevOps core practices used in application development, including version control, CI/CD, and collaboration, for infrastructure automation. This Refcard introduces the fundamentals of a mature GitOps model, the key benefits of GitOps, and the elements of a GitOps workflow for new feature deployment.
