UNDERSTANDING HOW GITOPS IS CHANGING SYSTEM SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ARCHITECTURE Posted on : Dec 12 - 2020

GitOps is a term which is gaining momentum recently. As an advanced model of DevOps, it scales up the system architecture and ensures transparency, efficiency and feasibility in the process. It leverages Git as the single source of truth, for creating a mechanism that control, create and delete the system architecture. By definition, GitOps is an inter-disciplinary code-based infrastructure that intertwines the Infrastructure as a code (IaC), and DevOps practices. It empowers the system developers to perform tasks that fall under the paradigm of IT operations.

A paper titled, “GitOps On AWS: Increase Velocity of your DevOps team”, by Amazon Web Services, states that GitOps helps DevOps teams to be more productive and autonomous by enabling continuous deployment through the tools they work in every day. GitOps puts Git at the centre of the DevOps toolchain and as the source of truth to analyze what should be deployed on the system infrastructure cluster.

The research paper cites four principles, through which GitOps works effectively. It states that the entire system infrastructure gets described in Git. Once the system is described, all the changes, operations and applications get transitioned to Git as a single version of the truth. The changes are automatically applied using cloud-native tools. Additionally, the Software agents continuously monitor the Git repo to meet any changes or divergences from inside the cluster. While creating a DevOps framework, developers are often unable to understand the Ops part. As a result, the full potential and benefit of DevOps is not realised by the team. The paper states that by utilizing the GitOps in the infrastructure deployment, monitoring and managing Kubernetes, the DevOps can increase their overall output by 2-3 times, with advanced security and compliance regulations.

As Kubernetes manage containerized workloads and automation by facilitating both declarative configurations and automation, leveraging GitOps becomes important to increase the overall output and productivity.

The paper cites that by using GitOps, the DevOps team can roll back or revert any catastrophic event. The team can also build an audit log for cluster changes, and establish an end-to-end continuous integration and continuous everything principle, driven by pull requests and fully reproducible through Git. The DevOps team can also embed security by leveraging Git’s correctness and strong cryptography, for tracking and managing changes across the entire cluster. Moreover, GitOps uses declarative specification to describe every process of the whole system, which is a transparent process and anyone can view the entire audit trail process, the time stamp, changes made and the committer information. This implies that the application can be audited using the software development and delivery.

The concept of GitOps is fairly nascent established in the year 2017 but have significantly deployed by organizations such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM for efficient DevOps procedure. Source