GitOps FAQs: 6 Commonly Asked Questions by Beginners

In January 2022, Magalix joined Weaveworks, the company that pioneered the GitOps operational framework for infrastructure automation in cloud-native environments. Through our partnership, we aim to help organizations leverage more opportunities for innovation and value-creation. To read more about this new, exciting partnership, click here.

In this article, we’ve put together 5 of the most commonly asked on GitOps by beginners. If you’re further ahead in your GitOps journey, you can explore the Weaveworks expanded list of FAQs here. 

1- What is GitOps?

GitOps is an application framework for cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes. Pioneered in 2017 by Weaveworks, it provides a set of workflows and adopts several DevOps best practices to help development teams automate the infrastructure in software development lifecycles (SDLC), and effectively manage cloud resources for continuous deployment pipelines.

By adopting GitOps and declarative tools, teams can use and control configuration files stored as code – also known as infrastructure-as-code or IaC – to meet their application needs. They can also apply end-to-end CI/CD pipelines and workflows to operations and application development.

2- Why Should I use GitOps?

GitOps enables teams to manage their IT infrastructure through processes and tools that they already use. This helps simplify SDLC processes, increases productivity, and improves collaboration.

The Git repository, one of the key components of GitOps, functions as a “single source of truth” for application code and infrastructure definitions. It makes it easy to deploy applications and quickly reproduce the same infrastructure environment whenever an application is deployed.

GitOps also enables continuous integrations to speed up development, resulting in faster releases, time-to-market, and customer time-to-value. It helps teams to be more agile, so they can quickly and effectively respond to customer needs.

GitOps supports infrastructure automation, so teams can focus on development, rather than on manual setup tasks. Further, built-in revert and rollback capabilities reduce downtime and recovery time in the event of an outage. Codified and repeatable IaC reduces human error, and increases the stability and reliability of development workflows. It helps create a more elastic infrastructure, simplifies cloud resource management, and decreases provisioning and management costs.

GitOps provides a version control system that’s backed by strong cryptography to enhance security. Audit trails provide more visibility into activities to keep teams compliant and on the same page – without affecting collaboration, agility, or speed.

Download this Comprehensive ebook for beginners on GitOps here.

3- How Does GitOps Work?

GitOps is not a single tool, process, or platform, but a set of workflows, processes, and tools to manage IT infrastructure in cloud-native environments. In GitOps, application development and infrastructure management happen in the same version control system. 

GitOps best practices can be applied to many infrastructure automation needs, including virtual machines (VMs), containers, and Kubernetes.

GitOps incorporates three key components:

1. Git: This is an open source version control system to track code changes. It also helps maintain IaC for easy infrastructure replications and rollbacks.

2. Merge requests (MRs): MRs provide a change and audit mechanism for infrastructure updates. Teams can collaborate via reviews and comments, identify and correct errors before pushing code to production, and rollback changes if required.

3. Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD): The problem with CI/CD is that it isn’t as automated as it promises to be. This is because of the numerous manual tasks required at each step. GitOps extends CI/CD with end-to-end automation.

GitOps automates infrastructure updates, testing, and deployment with CI/CD tooling and pipelines. Automation overwrites any configuration drift (e.g., manual errors) so the environment effectively attains the desired state.

4- How Secure are GitOps Workflows?

In GitOps, teams use a simplified toolchain and a single infrastructure management platform which reduces the attack surface. Even if an attack occurs, they can quickly revert to a desired state, and continue development in a safe environment.

Strong access control, merge requests and change logs limit who can make changes to the production environment – without impacting collaboration between stakeholders.

According to GitHub Product Manager Maya Kaczorowski, GitOps can increase the security of the entire development pipeline, from the code itself to the code change process. Together, version control, built-in audit trails, configuration as code, and a single source of truth bring greater accountability, prevent data loss, and help make changes secure.

5- DevOps Vs GitOps: What's the Difference?

GitOps applies many DevOps best practices for infrastructure automation and application deployment. Thus, there are overlaps between these ideas, But there are differences as well.

DevOps refers to a mix of tools, processes, and culture to help teams improve development and output quality. The approach encourages them to collaborate, deploy more frequently, and address issues faster. It involves a fairly comprehensive toolchain and accepts both declarative and prescriptive approaches.

GitOps is a declarative rather than prescriptive framework that’s tied to a specific tool called Git. Its toolchain is thus lighter than DevOps. Also, its main focus is IaC to simplify processes and speed up development.

Git functions as the single source of truth to define application code, and automate infrastructure provisioning and management. With this repository-centric approach, all configuration files and application code are centralized in the same place.

GitOps focuses on cloud-native services, microservices, and containerized software, while DevOps fits with monolithic application models, applications with limited components, containers, and even bare metal deployments.

In many ways, GitOps is “DevOps for Kubernetes”. It provides a new, more reliable methodology to do Kubernetes cluster management and application delivery, and run Kubernetes in production and at scale.

6- How Do I Get Started with GitOps?

It’s very easy to get started with GitOps. The main tool is the Git repository which is both responsive and easy to use. In addition, your development team can use their regular software development tools, as well as declarative tools to version control all infrastructure configuration files and source code in Git.

The GitOps framework also provides two tools for collaboration and CI/CD. They simplify application deployment and infrastructure automation.

So, if you’d like to get started with GitOps right away, explore Weave GitOps Core, a free and open source continuous delivery tool to run apps in any Kubernetes cluster. If you need more support from GitOps pioneers, check out Weave GitOps Enterprise. This continuous operations product can help you easily deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters and applications at scale.

To know more about GitOps, check out Weaveworks’ GitOps blogs and Kubernetes CICD Guide. 

Trusted Delivery with Weaveworks

The unified Magalix/Weaveworks team will continue to focus on Trusted Application Delivery, which will include codified policies to GitOps. We also aim to deliver consistent and secure end-to-end workflows and enhanced experiences, so teams can achieve agility and accelerate innovation.

Trusted Delivery Benefits:

1- Enforcing security and compliance, from source to production: DevOps teams can apply consistent policies and best practices across multiple Kubernetes environments. Customers will be able to bridge the gap between developers, DevOps, and security teams by shifting left using policy as code.

2- Runtime policy and drift management guards protect production deployments: Using our KubeGuard agent ensures any runtime drift is detected and automatically remediated. Customers are assured that policies are being enforced across all deployments and are immediately aware of any violations.

3- Embedding security in GitOps workflows: By integrating policy as code into GitOps workflows - the source, build, and deployment stages - we simplify DevSecOps initiatives and enable cloud-native environments to be more intrinsically secure.

Final Thoughts

For the answers to more questions like these, head on over to Weaveworks official GitOps FAQ. If you’d like to reap the benefits of Trusted Application Delivery with Magalix and Weaveworks, check out Weave GitOps Enterprise or Request a demo.