Overview of GitOps

GitOps :

GitOps is an emerging technology that is basically referred to as the ideal set of practices that empowers developers to perform the specific tasks which fall under the category of IT operation. GitOps is useful to describe, observe and declare on the basis of continuation including everything but is not limited to the case of Continuous Integration (CI).

It upholds the principle that Git is the one and only source of truth. All the changes to the desired state are traceable. It also serves as an operating model for developing and delivering Kubernetes-based infrastructure and applications. It empowers developers to take an operation and ship it in its own way. Whereas, GitOps can manage the whole system to be managed declaratively by using convergence and without the support of Kubernetes. 

So, in simple, we can say GitOps are operational frameworks that make the best practice of DevOps and uses that DevOps and uses it for version control, and application development.

GitOps in particular practice :

• GitOps is not limited to a single product, plugin, or platform.
• GitOps workflows help manage all over IT infrastructure through processes. It requires three core components i.e. IaC, MRs, and CI/CD.

GitOps Working :

The GitOps principles are flexible and can be applied to many types of infrastructure automation which mainly includes VMs and containers and effectively creates its impact on the teams which manage Kubernetes based infrastructure. The variant of GitOps differs when focused on a developer center's experience. GitOps has embraced organization with continuous integration code and hence it's a workflow of choice. With GitOps, any change with infrastructure is required to be committed to the git repository along with any change in application.

Future of GitOps :

There is a common belief that GitOps may be the upcoming the future over DevOps as GitOps is declarative and has a cloud-native approach which configures and manages. However, the future of GitOps may not be in everyone’s favor. As Git will only be able to pull requests as the most optimal workflow for their infrastructure.

Features of GitOps :

It is used for a number of reasons. But important features are

• It enables continuous deployment delivery and provides an approach for organizations to push applications more quickly and continuous deployment removes the need for any individual deployment.
• Moreover, it also allows an organization to use a single tool for controlling infrastructure and at the same time enables version control for the change in configuration

Benefits of GitOps :

There are quite some beneficial things provided by GitOps-

• No doubt increases the productivity as well as delivery and deployment
• Reliability works through revert and fork features.
• Standardized workflows centered around Git
• Enables the organization to use a single set tool.
• Provides additional visibility
• Lowers the potential variables in management
• Provides potential attack surface
• Is lightweight and vendor-neutral
• Closers devs and ops closer

Cons of GitOps :

• Users can face broken references out of the YAML side
• It creates a pull approach where users are limited to using only tools that result in executing pulls.
• Has potential for API throttling since GitOps will consistently keep polling Git Repo
• Proliferation of repositories
• Does not keeps up with the updates of programming.

Finally, this GitOps has its sweet spots but not for every deployment problem, but the core has all the abilities which create an immutable deployment process with tools and processes that teams are leveraging. But one thing we can say is that future in GitOps is bright on the side of continuous deployment.