Understanding GitOps: The Future of DevOps Automation

If you’ve been working in IT for a while, you will have noticed that managing applications and infrastructure is becoming more and more complex. Even with the best DevOps practices in place, it’s easy to get lost in all the manual configurations and scripting deployments, and sometimes, you’ll just have to hope that nothing breaks in the process. 

But what if there was a better way? What if you could manage your entire infrastructure and application setup with the same ease and control as you manage your code? That’s the promise of GitOps. Not just another buzzword, but a paradigm shift in DevOps and automation that’s promising to transform how we build, deploy, and manage software. Let’s find out what it is, how it works, and what the benefits are. 

What is GitOps? 

GitOps takes the power of Git, the version control system you know and (hopefully) love, and applies it to the world of infrastructure and operations. Basically, your infrastructure configurations, application code, and even your deployment pipelines are all defined as code and stored securely in a Git repository. 

Origin and evolution 

The concept of GitOps first emerged in 2017, at a company called Weaveworks. They coined the term to describe a set of practices that leverage Git as the single source of truth for declarative infrastructure and application configuration. It’s a natural evolution of DevOps principles that takes Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) to the next level by integrating it with continuous delivery pipelines. 

The rise of GitOps is obviously tied to the explosive growth of Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies. These systems’ distributed nature and countless moving parts, need a better and automated approach to management. GitOps, with its emphasis on version control, audit capabilities, and automation, provides the perfect solution to avoid human error and enable faster, more reliable deployments. 

Core principles 

To truly grasp the essence of GitOps, it’s essential to understand its four core principles. Let’s take a look at what makes it tick. 

Declarative approach 

GitOps embraces a declarative approach, where you define the desired state of your system in code, and the system automatically configures itself to match that state. Think of it like setting the thermostat in your home – you specify the desired temperature, and the system takes care of reaching and maintaining it. This principle, where repeated execution of the same action produces the same result, is also called idempotency. 

Version control 

As we mentioned earlier, Git will serve as the single source of truth for all your infrastructure and application configurations, ensuring immutability. Every change and tweak will be tracked and versioned, giving you a complete audit trail and making rollbacks pretty much effortless. Thanks to security measures like SSH keys that authenticate these changes, your workflow remains secure.  

Automation 

It shouldn’t surprise you by now that GitOps relies heavily on automation. Software agents (also called GitOps operators) continuously monitor your Git repository and your live infrastructure to spot any differences between your desired state and the actual state and reconcile them. Besides maintaining consistency, it will also help you prevent manual errors, respond to outages, and even enable self-healing capabilities. 

CI/CD 

As a natural consequence of its automation capabilities, GitOps will streamline your CI/CD pipelines. Whenever changes are committed to the Git repository, a pipeline is triggered that handles building, testing, and deploying the application. That way, you can be sure that your applications are always in sync with the latest code and configurations. 

Key components 

The four core principles we discussed result in four key components that every GitOps setup needs to function properly. You will probably have most (if not all) of these running already as part of your DevOps stack, but it’s always good to check the boxes to be sure. 

1. Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools like Terraform, OpenTofu, Bicep and Pulumi are, of course, at the basis of GitOps. They will allow you to define your infrastructure and application configurations as code. 
2. Git repositories will act as the central hub for storing and managing your IaC configuration files. As we pointed out in the core principles, these repos provide version control, auditability, and collaboration features. 
3. CI/CD pipelines automate the build, test, and deployment processes whenever changes are pushed to your Git repository. They make sure that updates flow continually to your production environment. 
4. Monitoring tools will give you real-time visibility into your system’s health and performance, alerting you to any discrepancies between the desired state and the actual state. 

What are the benefits of GitOps? 

Just like DevOps, GitOps impacts more than just your technological processes. There are several benefits to this advanced way of working for your team’s productivity, collaboration, and overall success. 

• Increased reliability: you’ll no longer need to worry about configuration drift and human error. Minimising manual intervention and embracing a single source of truth leads to more reliable and stable systems. 
• Faster delivery: continuous deployment and automated synchronisation means that you can release more frequently and confidently, accelerating your time to market. 
• Improved collaboration: GitOps promotes transparency and teamwork between development and operations. It’s a recipe for a smoother, more efficient workflow. 
• Enhanced security: every change is tracked; every action is auditable. GitOps gives you a clear audit trail and improves your security posture. 
• Increased productivity: nobody likes drowning in manual tasks. GitOps frees you from tedious tasks and lets you focus on innovation. 
• Improved developer experience: working with cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes is a lot easier with GitOps, since you can (re)use your familiar Git workflows. 
• More stability and easier rollbacks: issues happen, that’s just a fact of life. Luckily, GitOps makes things easier with quick recovery when things do go wrong. 
• Consistency and standardisation: with everyone working the same way, it’s much easier to know who’s doing what – and where you may need to chip in. 

Conclusion 

Like we mentioned at the start, GitOps isn’t just another buzzword; it’s a fundamental shift in how we approach DevOps automation. It uses the power of Git and a declarative approach to bring simplicity, reliability, and agility to infrastructure and application management. 

While it’s currently still up-and-coming, we expect it to become more popular are more organisations embrace the potential of cloud-native technologies and strive for faster, more frequent releases.
 

Ready to unlock the power of GitOps and revolutionise your DevOps workflows? Contact our experts to find out more!