GigaOm Examines the Key Criteria for Choosing a GitOps Solution
In GigaOm’s new Key Criteria report, they examine what GitOps is, why you should adopt it and what features you should look for when choosing a solution. The report explains why GitOps works so well today, and predicts that soon, its underlying principles will be used beyond the world of cloud-native software development.
In GigaOm’s new Key Criteria report, they examine what GitOps is, why you should adopt it and what features you should look for when choosing a solution. The report explains why GitOps works so well today, and predicts that soon, its underlying principles will be used beyond the world of cloud-native software development.
Key criteria for implementing GitOps
GigaOm defines ‘key criteria’ as the characteristics of a technology that are likely to differentiate the best vendors from the rest – and therefore the features that need to be identified when evaluating your options. Below, we provide a brief summary of GigaOm’s findings on GitOps, but we urge you to read their full report, whether you’re a start-up or an established business.
To learn how you can benefit from a solution that offers all these key criteria, please get in touch with us today.
A GitOps evaluation guide
These are the primary criteria for evaluation – and while we at Weaveworks can help you benefit from all of them, not all are offered by every GitOps centric solution. As GigaOm explains in their report, you should consider each of these criteria according to your organization's specific priorities.
Automated Rollback and Recovery
The first characteristic that GigaOm identifies is the ability you have with GitOps to roll back to what they call a ‘last known good’ deployment. In other words, a solution should enable you to roll back instantly to a point at which the application and infrastructure running in production matches the ideal configuration held in version control (e.g. Git).
Security and Auditability
Compliance and security are critical in most organizations, which is why GigaOm names Security and Auditability as the second of their key criteria. They call out features such as role-based access control (RBAC), policy management and the ability to specify exactly how much freedom developers will have to make changes. Crucially, you need the ability to look back and see who did what, when. With a system that offers all these features, you can effectively generate audit trails on demand.
Fleet Management Support
Many organizations will need to work with multiple target environments at once, operating across a fleet of Kubernetes applications and target clusters or back-end services. By using GitOps to centralize diverse infrastructure like this, the entire fleet can benefit from the features described above, from straightforward rollback and recovery to improved security and compliance. It also makes progressive and controlled deployments easier to manage across large fleets. Examples might include making a new feature available for a subset of users, or testing out a configuration change.
Secrets Management
In cloud-native development, developers need to work with multiple logins, passwords and API keys on a daily basis, creating clear security risks. A credible GitOps platform must include secrets management functionality, so developers can write, test and deploy their code without constant access to sensitive information.
Observability and Monitoring
Crucial to the success of a GitOps implementation is observability – being able to monitor and see into everything, from the runtime application to the underlying Kubernetes infrastructure – even when that infrastructure is distributed across multiple clouds and different providers. Observability means you can see what is happening and, retrospectively, what happened – at any given point, despite this complexity.
Application State Management
This last criterion is a reference to storing everything in Git – not just basic configuration information but also application configuration and state information. Only when you are managing everything ‘as code’, with a single source of truth held in version control, will you reap the full benefits of GitOps.
Talk to us today
The GigaOm report is designed to help you choose the best GitOps vendor for you, using their key criteria as a guide. Ultimately however, the question is not just about whether your chosen solution does GitOps well enough – although that is clearly important. It is also about the unique needs of your organization. So to start a conversation about how we can help improve the way you work, please get in touch today.
