Benefits of Gitops

Git – Version Control 

Collaborative software development using pull requests.

Git is one of the most widely used open source distributed version control systems in the world today. It enables Pull Request (PR) and code review workflows. Pull requests provide visibility and measurability in to code changes. This in turn allows review of code changes, collaboration and integration of approval workflows in to DevOps processes

GitOps

Declarative paradigm to configure systems.

GitOps is based off a Git-based source code management system.  GitOps is the practice of using Git Pull Requests (PR) to verify and automatically deploy system infrastructure modifications. It is code-based infrastructure and operational procedures that rely on Git as a source control system. It’s an evolution of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and a DevOps best practice that leverages Git as the single source of truth, and control mechanism for creating, updating, and deleting system architecture.

Pull requests change the state of the Git repository. When approved and merged, pull requests will automatically sync the production environment to the new state of the repository. This live syncing pull request workflow is the core of GitOps. ie GitOps ensures that a system’s cloud infrastructure is immediately reproducible based on the state of a Git repository.

Benefits Of GitOps

The following sections list down some of the salient benefits of using GITOPS best practices.

• Increased Productivity: Developers are more focussed on development where they are good at. Deployments are automated, which reduces mean time to deployment considerably. GitOps practices will increase overall development output by at least 50%.

• Faster and More Frequent Deployments: GitOps support high velocity deployments: safely ship updates many times a day, deploy instantaneously, observe results real time and roll back, if there is a problem. All this happens in the Git, which you use for developments, no extra tools.  More frequent feature releases means, less time to market.

• Enhanced Developer Experience: Developers are no more worried about Dockers, Containers or Kuberneties technologies and how to use it. They just have to use their familiar programming languages and tools for development and push the changes and new features to Git, as soon as it is ready. Training for new team members will be lesser and easier, making them productive very fast.

• Built on Best Practices: GitOps is built on pre-existing best practices around Git workflow, Infrastructure as Code, CICD pipelines, immutable servers, monitoring and observability, which helps in leveraging existing tools and resource knowledge.

• Improved Stability: Using git workflows to manage clusters will enable audit logs for reviewing and monitoring all changes. Audit trails help you comply with SOC 2 and also to ensure stability

• Higher Reliability: GitOps practices considerably reduces mean time to recovery after a failure. Since Git is the single source of truth, it can support stable and reproducible roll backs for quick recovery.

• Consistency and Standardization: GitOps single model for making infrastructure, apps and clusters give a consistent end-to-end workflow across the organization. Both CI/CD pipeline and operations are driven by pull requests, and are fully reproducible thru Git.

• Better Security: Git uses strong cryptography to track and manage changes, as well as the ability to sign changes to prove authorship and origin is key to a secure definition of the desired state of the system. You don’t have to give direct access to developers to environments.
• Easier compliance and auditing: Every change to any environment happens thru the Git repository. Git audit logs track all such changes happening in the system, which in turn help in compliance, reviews, monitoring, auditing and reporting.

Summary
GitOps is an operating model for building secure, cloud native, continuous delivery pipelines. In GitOps, the entire system is described declaratively, desired system state is versioned in Git, approved changes can be applied automatically to the system, software agents ensure correctness and alert on divergence. GitOps provide increased productivity, scalability, security and compliance for DevOps.