You’re wondering why we are blogging about GitOps and some of its basic concepts, right? Magalix recently joined Weaveworks, the GitOps company, to strengthen security of GitOps pipelines. And we have taken it upon ourselves to spread some of the GitOps knowledge to our readers.
Overview
You’ve probably heard of GitOps, read a blog or two about it, have seen large enterprises such as Deutsche Telekom, IBM, Axel Springer, Mettle, and more adopt the GitOps framework. People call it the future of DevOps and with due reason. Teams that have adopted GitOps practices have seen incredible results, such as increased productivity, enhanced developer experience, and improved stability, and more. In this blog, we will zoom into some of these incredible results that the GitOps model has to offer.
The State of DevOps Report 2021
The Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2021 by the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) identified 5 key performance indicators that measure software delivery performance. Teams that excel in the five performance measures demonstrate exceptional organizational performance; these measures are called software delivery and operational (SDO) performance. Four out of the five metrics measure software delivery performance and the fifth metric represents operational performance.
Software Delivery Performance Indicators are:
- Deployment frequency measures how often an organization deploys code to production or releases it to end users. Elite performing teams deploy on demand (multiple deployments/day).
- Lead time for changes is the time it takes for committed code to successfully run in production. Elite teams lead time for changes is less than an hour.
- Time to restore service is the time it takes to restore a service when a service incident or a defect impacts users. For elite teams, it takes them less than an hour to restore service.
- Change failure rate is the percentage of changes to production or to users that result in degraded service. That percentage is between 0-15% for elite teams.
Operational Performance Indicators:
- Reliability is the degree to which teams can keep promises and assertions about the operated software.
What is GitOps?
Coined by Weaveworks in 2017, GitOps is an operational framework around Kubernetes, allowing Developers and DevOps teams to use Git for cluster management and application delivery. Considered as the evolution of DevOps, GitOps uses the existing processes of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), version control, code review, and CI/CD pipelines for software development.
Git lies at the center of the delivery pipeline in the GitOps model; it houses all information, code, and documentation for Kubernetes deployments. With GitOps, a software agent controls any new cluster deployments by polling the Git repositories for any new changes. Once the agent detects a new change ( a mismatch between the desired state and the running state), it will ‘pull’ the new changes into the cluster.
.As an operating model for cloud-native applications, GitOps is built on the following four principles:
- #1: The entire system is described declaratively
- #2: The canonical desired system state versioned in Git.
- #3. Approved changes that can be automatically applied to the system.
- #4. Software agents to ensure correctness and alert on divergence.
To read more about GitOps basics, visit our 101 guide here or download the book GitOps for Absolute Beginners by the GitOps creators.
5 Reasons Why Businesses Adopt GitOps
We’ve summarized the top five reasons why businesses are switching to the GitOps framework of deployment and what some GitOps customers have to say about it.
Reason #1: Increased Speed and Productivity
In GitOps, most of the operations overhead is operated such as the continuous deployment automation with an integrated feedback loop. This automation means that teams have an easier time pushing a minimum viable change and revert changes if there’s a problem. Faster deployments increase the overall development output, ultimately speeding the launch of new products faster.
“For Kubernetes, Gitops provides a simple audit trail that is invaluable in figuring out what has broken. Flux (and our Tidebot) give our developers a low-risk self-deployment option. Together, Flux and GitOps accelerate our innovation.” - Tidepool.
To learn more about how GitOps empowers businesses, download the Whitepaper: How GitOps Boosts Business Performance: the Facts.
Reason #2: Enhanced Development Experience
GitOps is based on Git, a version control tool that is quite popular and most developers are familiar with it. Developers can manage updates and introduce new features without needing to learn new technologies and how they work (such as Kubernetes). This means that novice developers can be productive much sooner.
“GitOps feels like the right way to manage Kubernetes clusters. Other pre-containerization CI/CD tools are flakey, fragile and take up valuable time - engineers should focus on solving code problems, and not on the deployment process.” - Curve
Reason #3: Stronger Security Guarantees
GitOps offers powerful security guarantees, right out of the box. Git’s strong cryptography to track and manage changes, and to prove authorship and origin, is paramount to the security of the development pipeline. Additionally, the use of pull versus the traditional push method of deployment eliminates the need for authorization for CI/CD tools.
“With Flagger, we merge a pull request to deploy a new version, and basically forget about it because we feel so safe and sure about it not breaking anything in production.' - Bernd Stübinger, MediaMarktSaturn”
Reason #4: Audit Trails for Compliance
Teams in highly regulated industries often experience decreased collaboration as policy mandates restrict who can make changes to the production environment. With GitOps, however, new code changes can be deployed using merge requests which must be approved. Additionally, GitOps provides you with an audit trail of who did what, and when, to your cluster to meet compliance requirements, and ensure stability.
“GitOps is a perfect fit as we have, with no extra effort or tooling, a fully auditable, permanent record of what is being merged to the repo and deployed into our production environments.” - Garry Wilson, Site Reliability Team Lead, Curve
Reason #5: Reduced MTTR and Increased Stability
One of the fundamental tenets of GitOps is that the entire system is described in Git, providing teams with a single source of truth. In the event of system failure or a deployment gone wrong, teams can easily revert or rollback the changes using Git’s built-in capabilities. This functionality drastically reduces the MTTR from hours or days to minutes and gives you stable and reproducible rollbacks of your entire application infrastructure.
“We see the GitOps model really as a key framework to achieve that level of automation and consistency across all of the workloads and platforms that telcos have to operate.” – Till Stenzel, Managing Director Advisory, Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners.
Final Thoughts
The 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps Report continues to demonstrate the importance of software delivery and operational performance in technology transformations. Key findings of the report outlined five metrics to measure software delivery performance. Each of the performance indicators mentioned can be improved by the GitOps framework and tools.
Weaveworks offers commercially supported GitOps packages - Weave GitOps - and can help you get started with GitOps. Request a Demo Now.
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