Continuous deployment is a software development strategy that automates the release of applications after changes in the codebase. This process includes some predefined tests that must be successfully passed before the application is deployed.

Gitops is a set of practices to manage continuous deployment for cloud-native applications automatically. In other term, instead of making manual changes to the infrastructure, Gitops automates the process of deployment through the code and version control system.

The core idea of it is that the definition and desired state of the infrastructure should be stored in a git repository. This repository acts as the single source of truth and helps in the application release after some subsequent updates.

Advantages

1. Make the deployment process easier and faster in production.

2. Gitops has the entire history of the release. If the production update goes down, then it will help you to revert back to the previous environment. As we are using git for version controlling, we can roll back or forth changes at any time.

3. By using git, every member of the team will have the ability to look at the changes made in the infrastructure. This enables better communication among the team member while working with it. Team members can easily take references from the past infrastructure for troubleshooting and debugging the application.

Gitops Workflow

Gitops is an evolution of Infrastructure as code (IaC). Infrastructure as code means managing the infrastructure by code rather than relying on manual processes. It means that the operational team doesn't need to manage the server, and resources manually each time after deploying an app. This IaC acts as a blueprint or template for the desired production environment. Gitops follows a declarative approach which is a way of getting the desired state of the app after the release. The developer team provides a high-level description of the desired outcome in a configuration file and the system takes care of the necessary steps to make it happen.

Usually, CI/CD pipelines are automatically triggered after some external event. In the case of Gitops, if a PR is merged, then it will start its workflow.

Push-based vs. Pull-based Deployments

The deployment process is done in two different ways: Push-base and Pull-based

1. Push-based Deployment

The push-based deployment is implemented by two popular tools Jenkins, and CircleCI. The Git repository contains the application code along with yaml file for Kubernetes configuration. Once, an updated application code is pushed into the repository, the build pipeline is triggered, which builds the container images and starts the deployment process.

1. Pull-based Deployment

The pull-based deployment uses the same strategy but in a different way. In general, a CI/CD tool is only triggered after an external event. For example, when a new code is pushed. With pull-based deployment, a new operator is introduced in the cluster to monitor and pull changes whenever there is a deviation between the actual state and the desired state of the infrastructure. It continuously compares the environment repository and actual the state of deployed infrastructure. Whenever a change is detected, it updates the infrastructure to match the environment repository. It also observes the image registry to find new versions of images to redeploy.

Overall, GitOps is a way to manage your infrastructure code in a consistent and automated way, which helps to reduce errors and increase efficiency for continuous deployment. If you enjoyed reading this article, please give it a like and consider sharing it with your colleagues, and friends on social media. Additionally, you can follow me on Twitter and subscribe to my Newsletter for more updates. Thank you for reading.