GitOps : Elevate Your Developer Experience With Best Practices

Are you ready to supercharge your developer experience? In platform engineering, most developers equate Infrastructure as Code automation with GitOps

GitOps Best Practices follows DevOps practices as a developer framework for managing infrastructure and application configurations, with Git as the configuration source.

Naturally, you might wonder how to utilize GitOps to automate configuration setup and deployments across different environments. Before we explain how it does this, you need to know how GitOps works and its impact on the current developer experience.

What is GitOps?

Imagine having a seamless, automated workflow that keeps everything in sync and your team happy and productive. That’s precisely what GitOps does!

GitOps represents a developer-centric approach following standard DevOps practices for declarative infrastructure automation with Git repositories. It combines the best of both worlds: version control and continuous delivery.

Simply put, this enables you to manage infrastructure with the same Git workflows you use, making code deployments as easy as pushing a commit.

Why Is GitOps The Next Big Thing To Elevate Developer Experience?

In a world where speed and reliability are what Developers want, GitOps offers a lifeline to them for building code faster and managing the deployments:

• Consistency and Versioning: With Git as the single source of truth, every change is auditable and reversible at any time.
• Automation and Deployment: automates the deployment process by eliminating the chances of manual errors and increasing efficiency.
• Scalability and Reliability: It ensures that your infrastructure scales seamlessly and remains reliable, even as your team and projects grow.

Now, let’s dive deep to explore how GitOps works and what the best approach for implementing in the coming section.

The GitOps Way: How It Works?

As mentioned earlier, GitOps uses Git repositories to store the desired configuration state in different versions. Here’s a step-by-step breakdown:

• Declarative Configuration:  you can define your infrastructure and applications declaratively in Git. This approach converts all infrastructure configurations into code to create a reproducible environment.
• Continuous Deployment: Take one step further with your CI/CD pipelines and automate the deployment process following GitOps practices. The automated workflows will build and test the changes committed to the Git repository.
• Monitoring and Syncing: You can access tools like Flux or Argo to continuously monitor your environment and ensure it aligns with the desired state specified in Git. If there’s any drift, these tools automatically sync the environment to the correct state.

So, a typical GitOps architecture involves storing application source code and declarative environment configuration in Git repositories. Your developers can change the application source code and store it in an artifacts repository.

Implementing Best Practices To Improve Your Developer Experience

Start Small & Use Declarative Configurations Only

You can use basic GitOps workflows to power your smaller and non-critical projects. Thus, you can analyze potential challenges before implementing a full-scale solution. Ask your developers to define everything declaratively—infrastructure, applications, or policies. It will help you maintain deployment consistency across your developer environments in the future.

Improve DORA Metrics

GitOps can significantly enhance your team’s performance by improving pivotal DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics:

• Deployment Frequency: Increase how often you successfully release to production.
• Lead Time for Changes: Minimize the commit time before it reaches production.
• Change Failure Rate: Decrease the percentage of failed deployments in production.
• Time to Restore Service: Minimize the recovery duration from sudden failures.

These metrics are essential to balance the developer experience. Implementing GitOps can significantly improve all of these metrics.

Embrace Automation With Continuous Deployment Tooling

Use GitOps to automate as much as possible. Automation reduces human errors and increases efficiency. While GitOps isn’t solely about tools, continuous deployment systems like ArgoCD and Flux are what your developers must use to improve their productivity. So, you must incorporate tools that support Flux, Argo CD, Jenkins X, or Spinnaker. These tools automate the deployment of your infrastructure as per the Git repository. Thus, your live environment always remains in sync with the desired state.

Enforce Security Best Practices

Security comes next! As you implement safeguards such as branch protection and appropriate secret management, GitOps workflows ensure that only authorized changes are made to the source code. It prevents any type of unauthorized access request and balances reliability and security across all development environments. So, we suggest you use Git’s native features like signed commits and implement RBAC and secrets management tools like HashiCorp Vault for maximum security.

Focus On Shared Responsibility Model

DevOps was initially formed to enable Developers and Operations Engineers to work together. GitOps extends this concept by highlighting the effectiveness of a shared responsibility model among different teams to manage and deploy applications more efficiently.

So, if you have a platform team, application deployment team, and software developers, here’s how each team uses GitOps:

• The platform team manages infrastructure provisioning and code commits as they add Terraform Config for subscription vending.
• The application deployment team maintains cluster health and performance, committing Namespace, ArgoCD Application, and Role Bindings.
• The software developers handle continuous integration and delivery, updating deployment references and adding expected container signatures on release.

In this shared responsibility model, you can spread expertise across different teams, enhancing developer experience!

In Action: Let’s Discuss Real-World Use Cases

So far, we have only covered the theoretical aspects of GitOps implementation. But how does it fare when practiced in the real world? Which complexities and unexpected challenges you might face? Let’s find these answers as we explore how you can seamlessly integrate into your day-to-day operations!

Cloud Resource Management

GitOps naturally supports Kubernetes clusters due to their declarative nature and immutable infrastructure. However, real-world cloud infrastructures, especially hybrid clouds, include resources like bare metal, virtual machines, network devices, cloud databases, and containers. Each resource type has its lifecycle; for example, a Kubernetes cluster’s lifecycle differs from that of a virtual machine or bare metal server. This diversity requires tailored strategies in applying GitOps practices.

Implementing Immutable Infrastructures

GitOps promotes immutable infrastructures and declarative containers, meaning post-deployment changes are prohibited. However, when deploying applications on legacy infrastructures with long lifecycles, GitOps can still manage these environments, ensuring versioned changes and improved security. This approach bridges the gap between traditional and modern cloud-native applications.

Deployment Strategies: Push vs. Pull

Pull-based deployments are a GitOps best practice for enhanced security. However, not all scenarios fit this model. Push-based deployments involve provisioning cloud infrastructure with tools like Jenkins or Ansible. These tools might not fully support declarative configurations, so push-based strategies sound more practical in specific environments.

Managing Multiple Environments

In practical terms, GitOps must support multiple environments: production, development, and staging. A common strategy involves setting up corresponding branches in a Declarative Config Repository for each environment. GitOps Agents monitor these branches, pulling changes accordingly. For instance, the development environment tracks the development branch, while the staging and production environments track their respective branches.

Getting Started With GitOps: It’s Time For A Change!

Ready to transform your developer experience with GitOps? Adopting GitOps begins with following a developer-centric operational framework incorporating different DevOps practices. You should also implement a shared responsibility model to increase collaboration and clarity. Lastly, maintain strong DevOps fundamentals and revolutionize your developer experience with GitOps!