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Continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD) and DevOps — you often hear these terms used interchangeably, and you’ve likely heard them bundled in together with GitOps. So what is GitOps? And when you’re comparing GitOps vs. DevOps, how are they different?
GitOps vs. DevOps
GitOps is an operating model. It unifies automation, application delivery, infrastructure management and security to create a declarative framework for faster, higher quality application development and delivery. Sound a lot like DevOps? That’s because it is – GitOps is DevOps. It’s a natural progression enabled by the declarative workflows popularized throughout the industry by Kubernetes. But how does GitOps work? This is a question we get asked often. So often that we’ve bundled all our GitOps best practices into a new e-book — The Path to GitOps.
Red Hat and GitOps
Red Hat has participated in the evolution of GitOps since the beginning, and we’ve combined our expertise in Kubernetes with the needs outlined by customers who are implementing a GitOps framework. We’re seeing interest in GitOps continue to grow as people hear about more teams — even whole organizations — reaping the benefits of using familiar Git processes to maintain their infrastructure as code and automate their applications from configuration to multi-cluster deployments.
How to implement GitOps
Hearing about the benefits of GitOps workflows only gets you so far, however, so how do you get started? What best practices have evolved as GitOps has matured through use across our industry?
In The Path to GitOps you’ll find outlines of the tools, workflows and structures that teams should consider when implementing an end-to-end GitOps workflow. It introduces core concepts for practitioners who are just getting started or who are considering developing a GitOps practice for their team. The Path to GitOps walks through GitOps principles, available toolsets like ArgoCD and Flux, best practices for security and secrets management, as well as tips for managing your Git workflows and directory structures.
Getting started with GitOps
Recently, the explosion of interest and the maturity in our customer implementations of GitOps has been overwhelmingly positive, but we consistently see that the hardest part is getting started. Software developers, infrastructure engineers and anyone else looking for tips on how to implement GitOps or how to introduce it to their team, will find that The Path to GitOps a comprehensive introduction and a great reference to return to as you explore each aspect of an end-to-end GitOps workflow.
We hope The Path to GitOps will provide business and IT leaders alike a common ground to kickstart planning how to integrate GitOps into your business and application development cycles.
Ready for the next steps? Sign up now for our GitOps Cookbook coming in late 2022, providing a collection of useful recipes to use when implementing GitOps practices on Kubernetes.
About the authors
Harriet Lawrence is a product manager on the OpenShift GitOps team and is based in Scotland.
Christian Hernandez currently leads the Developer Experience team at Codefresh. He has experience in enterprise architecture, DevOps, tech support, advocacy, software engineering, and management. He's passionate about open source and cloud-native architecture. He is an OpenGitOps Maintainer and an Argo Project Marketing SIG member. His current focus has been on Kubernetes, DevOps, and GitOps practices.
