GitOps and IaC: What are they?

What is GitOps? 

GitOps is an operational framework that takes the best application development practices from DevOps (such as version control, collaboration, compliance, and CI/CD) and applies them to infrastructure automation.  

How does GitOps actually work? 

 GitOps ensures that a system's cloud infrastructure is immediately reproducible, based on the state of a Git repository. Pull requests modify the state of the Git repository. Once approved and merged, the pull requests will automatically reconfigure and sync the live infrastructure to the state of the repository.  

What are the benefits? 

- A Git version control system enhances security and compliance 

 A simplified toolchain reduces attack surfaces since teams use a single platform for infrastructure management. If an attack does occur, teams can revert to a desired state using the version control system. As a result, GitOps reduces downtime and outages, enabling teams to continue development in an uncompromised environment. 

 - Established best practices enhance collaboration and productivity 

 GitOps incorporates software development best practices for infrastructure as code, Git workflow, and CI/CD pipelines. Operations teams already have these pre-existing skills, knowledge, and toolchain requirements, so the decision to adopt GitOps won’t cause a significant learning curve. 

 - Automation improves the developer experience and reduces cost 

 CI/CD tooling and continuous deployment cause productivity to increase, as teams benefit from automation and can focus on development rather than investing time on tedious, manual tasks. 

- Continuous integrations leads to faster development and deployment 

 Teams have an easier time pushing a minimum viable change since GitOps enables faster and more frequent deployments. 

 - Git workflows increase stability and reliability 

 Infrastructure is codified and repeatable, reducing human error. Merge requests facilitate code reviews and collaboration, and also help teams to identify and correct errors before they make it to production. 

 source:https://about.gitlab.com/topics/gitops/gitops-best-practices/ 

What are the main tools that can be used for GitOps? 

 ArgoCD 

 Argo CD is a declarative, GitOps-compatible, continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes. 

WHY ArgoCD?

Application definitions, configurations, and environments should be declarative and version controlled. Application deployment and lifecycle management should be automated, auditable, and easy to understand. 

 source:https://argo-cd.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ 

 Flux 

 Flux is a tool for keeping Kubernetes clusters in sync with sources of configuration (like Git repositories) and automating updates for configuration when there is new code to deploy. 

WHY FLUX? 

• specialized tools and Flux Controllers 
• composable APIs 
• reusable Go packages for GitOps. 

https://fluxcd.io/docs/ 

WHAT IS IaC? 

 Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the managing and provisioning of infrastructure through code instead of through manual processes. 

IaC creates configuration files that contain your infrastructure specifications, which makes it easier to edit and distribute configurations. It also ensures that you provision the same environment every time. By codifying and documenting your configuration specifications, IaC aids configuration management and helps you to avoid undocumented, ad-hoc configuration changes. 

 source: https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/automation/what-is-infrastructure-as-code-iac 

 WHY SHOULD WE USE IaC? 

 - Consistency in configuration and setup 

 - Minimized risk of human error 

 - Increased efficiency in software development 

 - Facilitating financial savings 

 - Wrapping up 

 Declarative vs. Imperative approaches to IaC 

 Imperative systems are often initially easier to introduce and implement. You could say that an imperative system is organized in line with how a human thinks. Imperative systems allow you to view configuration as a series of actions or steps, each bringing you closer to your final goal. Another benefit of imperative language is that it allows you to automate very detailed and complex configurations by building up multiple layers of commands. 

With an imperative tool, the user must have enough knowledge to tell the automation platform what to do. With a declarative system, the user only needs to define the state of the final configuration and the platform determines how to achieve it.  

Another benefit of a declarative language is that it is more idempotent. The concept of idempotence refers to a process that can be executed multiple times with the same result. Because declarative language defines only the final state, it always ends up in the same place regardless of the start. On the other hand, imperative language envisions a task as a series of predefined steps that could lead to a different endpoint depending on the starting point. 

source: https://www.linode.com/blog/devops/declarative-vs-imperative-in-iac/ 

 MAIN TOOLS FOR IaC 

  Terraform 

Terraform is a free and open-source tool created by HashiCorp. It is also one of the most popular IaC tools. Terraform takes the declarative approach to IaC with a pre-execution check to maintain the desired result has been achieved. 

  AWS CloudFormation 

AWS’s CloudFormation is an integrated IaC solution that comes with the platform and covers DevOps’ needs and best practices. CloudFormation is another declarative solution, and since the software works specifically with AWS infrastructure in mind, the margin of error is small when working with AWS.  

 How to integrate IaC to a CI/CD pipeline 

  The continuous integration workflow enables development teams to quickly automate, self-test, build, clone, and deploy software. Terraform deploys infrastructure repeatably. By adding Terraform into a CI/CD workflow, you can deploy your infrastructure in the same pipeline. 

  - Terraform is a tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. 

- Terraform can manage existing and popular service providers as well as custom in-house solutions. 

 Once committed, the cloud-native team deploys changes (application logic, IaC, or both) using their CI/CD pipeline. This combination of IaC and CI/CD pipelines guarantees that the correct degree of infrastructure version and application version are migrated from development to staging to production. 

  This combined IaC and CI/CD pipeline process also provisions cloud infrastructure just-in-time, thus optimizing cloud costs. The cloud-native team can now rapidly and reliably develop, test, and deploy enhancements to both their application and its cloud infrastructure. 

Benefits of a combined IaC and CI/CD pipeline process: 

·       Guaranteed production environment to match development and staging environments 

·       Changes to infrastructure trigger appropriate system testing 

·       Easy to revert to prior versions of both cloud infrastructure and application code 

·       Easy to deploy separate development and staging environments for each developer or tester 

Conclusion 

 In this article we discuss integrating IaC into a CI/CD process and explain the basics of GitOps. IaC is essential for automating our infrastructure. At the end of the day, and from a DevOps perspective, we don’t want to introduce a manual process so that GitOps can automate your Continuous Deployment phase something is changing into your version control system GitOps tool recognized and deployment will start immediately. Furthermore, IaC is also important for creating automation in your infrastructure if you integrate into your CI/CD environment IaC trigger automatically and use for automation. As a result, Now, employees' time is getting increasingly valuable, so we need to use such automation tools to avoid manual and repetitive work. However, savings in time are also returned to us in terms of cost.