GitOps: Standard workflow for application development

GitOps uses Git repositories as a single source of truth to deliver infrastructure as code.

What is GitOps?

GitOps uses Git repositories as a single source of truth to deliver infrastructure as code. Submitted code checks the CI process while the CD process checks and applies requirements for things like security, infrastructure as code, or any other boundaries set for the application framework. All changes to code are tracked, making updates easy while also providing version control should a rollback be needed.

Many other tools can be used together to build a GitOps framework. For example, Git repositories, Kubernetes, CI/CD tools, and configuration management tools.

Learn more at the GitOps Guide to the Galaxy on OpenShift.tv, every other Thursday at 3pm ET.

GitOps delivers ...

Standard workflow for application development
Increased security by setting application requirements up front
Improved reliability with visibility and version control through Git
Consistency across any cluster, any cloud, and any on-prem environment

Why GitOps?

GitOps takes the philosophies and approaches promised to those investing in a DevOps culture and provides a framework to start realizing the results. Organizations who practice DevOps realize significant improvements to the rate of innovation in applications and code as well as stability according to the annual State of DevOps Report.

By using the same Git-based workflows that developers are familiar with, GitOps expands upon existing processes from application development to deployment, app lifecycle management, and infrastructure configuration.

Every change throughout the application lifecycle is traced in the Git repository and is auditable. Making changes via Git means developers can finally do what they want: code at their own pace without waiting on resources to be assigned or approved by ops teams.

For operations teams, visibility to change means the ability to trace and reproduce issues quickly improving overall security. With an up-to-date audit trail, organizations can reduce the risk of unwanted changes (drift) and correct them before they go into production.

These changes in code from development to production make organizations more agile in responding to changes in the business and competitive landscape.

How does Red Hat OpenShift enable GitOps?

Red Hat OpenShift consolidates the administration and management of applications spread across on-prem and public cloud resources to:

Check that clusters have similar state (configs, monitoring, storage) making application
Constraints known early in the development cycle
Rollback a change in code across multiple clusters by recovering clusters from a known state
Rollout a change submitted to Git across multiple Red Hat OpenShift clusters
Associate templated configurations across different environments

Red Hat OpenShift is a declarative Kubernetes platform that administrators can configure and manage using GitOps principles. Working within Kubernetes-based infrastructure and applications, consistency can be applied across clusters and development lifecycles.

Red Hat collaborates with open source projects like ArgoCD and Tekton Pipelines to implement a framework for GitOps. Install the Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines operator and learn how Red Hat is developing new tools with Argo to manage GitOps within existing Red Hat OpenShift deployments.

Why should developers care about GitOps?

Not sure where to start in your GitOps journey? Don Schenck, director of developer experience at Red Hat, has you covered.

Develop with GitOps

Interactive Tutorial

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This scenario will get you get familiar with syncwaves and hook phases.

Red Hat capabilities for GitOps

OpenShift Pipelines

Using Tekton, OpenShift Pipelines delivers a CI/CD experience to OpenShift. Run each step of the CI/CD pipeline in its own container, allowing them to scale independently to meet pipeline demands.

Learn about pipelines

OpenShift GitOps and Argo CD

OpenShift GitOps leverages Argo CD to manage configurations, definitions, and environments for both Kubernetes itself and the applications it hosts using Git as the source of truth.

Learn about Argo CD