GitOps: the best way to automate infrastructure management
DevOps has changed the game, transforming software development through automation and collaboration to speed things up, improve code quality, and make scaling simple. GitOps is the natural next step, applying DevOps best practices to infrastructure automation to increase speed and productivity, without compromising security or stability, and improve your developer experience.
What is GitOps?
GitOps is an operational framework applied to infrastructure and configuration automation. It incorporates familiar best practices, such as collaboration, version control, continuous delivery/deployment (CD), and compliance, and applies them to infrastructure automation.
In GitOps, everything from applications and networking to computing resources and storage is represented as code. But it's not version-control-system agnostic. It leverages Git, following a branch, code, check, merge (or pull request) workflow to develop the codebase, all of which can be controlled through automation.
Get to know GitOps
Top 10 benefits of GitOps
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GitOps & DevOps: differences, parallels, and why both is better
In this blog, we’re asking the question: what’s the difference between GitOps and DevOps?
Benefits of GitOps
- Power productivity and collaboration
GitOps simplifies processes, enables streamlined collaboration, and provides greater visibility for DevOps teams to maximise productivity.
- Speed up development and deployment
GitOps eliminates configuration differences, leading to faster and more frequent deployments, optimising feedback and delivering more value to customers.
- Make your developers happy
With predictable and repeatable application environment configurations, developers can focus on their work, enhancing employee satisfaction and retention.
- Reduce costs
GitOps reduces downtime, thanks to built-in deployment and roll-back functionality, and facilitates easier cloud resource management, resulting in significant time and effort savings.
- Be compliant, be stable
GitOps allows for faster iterations without compromising stability and reliability. Having a single source of truth makes recovery easier, and an audit trail for code reviews and compliance is provided.
- Stay secure without compromise
With pull requests and the GitOps operator, anyone can propose changes while maintaining the integrity of the production branch and ensuring the security.
Check out our DevOps Decrypted podcast!
DevOps Decrypted focuses on all things Development + Operations, with Adaptavist's expert staff discussing elements of the philosophy that has changed the world of software development.
Get started with GitOps
GitOps is not just a nice-to-have – it's fast becoming an essential component of software development success. But making the move to manage your infrastructure this way takes a certain level of DevOps maturity and the knowledge and experience to get GitOps off the ground.
If you're still getting started with DevOps or need support to take things further, we offer a wide range of services to meet your business needs – from maturity assessment and strategy creation to integrating solutions and automating your tools. Our partnerships with leading technology providers ensure you have complete DevOps solutions centred around your people, products, and end-users.
Our DevOps services
At Adaptavist, we offer a wide range of DevOps services to help businesses leverage the power of GitOps and transform their software development practices. Our experts assess your GitOps readiness, provide tailored recommendations, and guide you through the implementation process. We automate CI/CD pipelines and enable Infrastructure-as-Code practices for scalable and consistent delivery. We provide training programs and ongoing support and foster continuous improvement through regular assessments and feedback sessions. With our expertise, you can harness the benefits of GitOps, streamline software development, and achieve faster, high-quality deployments that drive business success.
- Maturity Assessment
- Training
- Strategy and implementation
- Integration solutions
- Cloud as a DevOps enabler
- Containerisation
- ChatOps
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How to implement GitOps
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GitOps challenges
GitOps faces challenges, including its focus on infrastructure and deployment rather than end-to-end software development. While it provides an audit trail, it only applies to infrastructure changes, which can be time-consuming to manage in complex applications. Familiarity with Git and pull requests is essential for GitOps adoption. Maintaining a clear record of pull requests and issues and avoiding direct edits in production requires commitment and governance. Achieving visibility and accountability may be easier in smaller organisations due to simpler structures. Despite these challenges, GitOps offers observability and visibility into the deployment process. Addressing these considerations and planning accordingly can ensure the successful implementation and management of GitOps in both small and large organisations.
GitOps with GitLab
If you want to strengthen collaboration between your infrastructure, ops, and dev teams and increase your software environments' stability, reliability, and security, look no further than GitLab. With version control, code review, CI/CD, and multi-cloud capabilities, this infrastructure automation and management solution embeds security capabilities and compliance within your DevOps platform.
As a GitLab Select and Professional Services partner, we can help you maximise your investment. Adaptavist's mission is to deliver end-to-end DevOps services and solutions to help you build and implement CI/CD systems. Our suite of GitLab solutions includes DevOps consulting, implementation, migration, integration, training, and managed services – all designed to help you get the most out of this powerful tool.
GitOps with GitLab: The bigger picture
Find out more about why GitLab is the ideal platform for your GitOps efforts.
Frequently asked questions
GitOps is an operational framework that applies version control practices and automation to infrastructure and configuration management. It leverages Git as the central source of truth, representing everything from applications to networking and storage as code. GitOps follows a branch, code, check, merge (or pull request) workflow using Git. A GitOps operator handles the synchronisation between the pipeline and the orchestration system, automatically updating the system with new code changes and state declarations from Git commits. This approach enables consistency, traceability, and automated management of infrastructure configurations for efficient and reliable software deployment.
The main difference between GitOps and DevOps is the latter involves a cultural change, whereby development and operations come together to help organisations build and improve products quickly and efficiently, but the tools you might use as part of your DevOps approach can vary.
GitOps, on the other hand, is a specific operational process tied to Git. It is an advanced application of DevOps principles, optimising Git as the single source of truth. GitOps primarily focuses on managing infrastructure through Git, empowering developers to control and trigger deployments. By adopting GitOps, organisations leverage Git's capabilities to manage and automate their infrastructure, ensuring consistency and traceability.
There are four key principles that apply when implementing your GitOps initiative:
1. A declarative system – GitOps focuses on specifying the desired end-state rather than the steps to achieve it. Users define the desired state, making it easy to store and manage in Git.
2. Versioned and immutable – with Git as your single source of truth, your desired state is stored in a way that enforces immutability and versioning. Complete version history allows for easy rollback, adherence to security measures through commit auditing, and analysis of changes over time.
3. Automatic pulling – with declared states held in Git, software agents automatically pull desired state declarations from the source. Once updated and approved, automation ensures that the desired state is consistently applied without human intervention.
4. Continuous reconciliation – software agents continuously observe and compare the actual system state to the desired state. If discrepancies or unexpected changes occur, immediate alerts are triggered, enabling proactive resolution.
Other than using Git, you don’t need a specific product or platform to do GitOps. But you will need to incorporate IaC, pull requests, and CD so your workflow looks something like this:
- The main branch can represent an environment (dev, test, production).
- You can implement changes in the feature branch.
- Then, you submit a petition to change the main branch (also referred to as a pull request or merge request).
- Infrastructure owners can then collaborate, review, and give feedback on the pull request to approve or reject the change.
- If the pull request/change is approved, the GitOps operator will notice the change in state. The GitOps operator then compares the desired state with the state of the existing infrastructure. Wherever there’s a mismatch, the system automatically reconciles the difference by overwriting the existing state with what is described in the Git repository.
- Assess suitability: Determine if your organisation is ready to embrace the software delivery culture and evaluate your application delivery pipeline to determine if GitOps would be beneficial.
- Design and Implement best practices: Develop and implement best practices for your infrastructure team to follow and adopt new solutions. Utilise external experts, leverage existing internal knowledge, and provide training to upskill your team.
- Choose deployment pipeline approach: Decide whether to have a dedicated pipeline for infrastructure changes, integrate them into existing pipelines, or adopt a hybrid approach based on your organisation's specific needs and requirements.
- Assess suitability: Determine if your organisation is ready to embrace the software delivery culture and evaluate your application delivery pipeline to determine if GitOps would be beneficial.
Get GitOps off the ground
If you’re interested in taking control of your infrastructure by implementing GitOps but aren’t sure where to start, our expert team is here to help. Get in touch today.