GitOps Days 2021 Final Recap: Tools & Technologies
On Day 2 of our GitOps Days event, we focused on the tools and technologies that enable GitOps. We were especially grateful to everyone who submitted a proposal for our first “Call for Papers”! Huge thanks to all the wonderful speakers,...
On Day 2 of our GitOps Days event, we focused on the tools and technologies that enable GitOps. We were especially grateful to everyone who submitted a proposal for our first “Call for Papers”! Huge thanks to all the wonderful speakers, and everyone who attended this year! We hope you had as much fun learning from these fantastic folks as we did!
Because there were so many great talks at GitOps Days, this is the third and final blog post of this series sharing highlights and new videos that we’ve added to the GitOps Days 2021 playlist! This week is all about the various tools and technologies, comparisons, and technical deep dives.
Cornelia Davis, CTO at Weaveworks, kicked off Day 2 with a slight variation on the “technical” theme by moderating a GitOps panel discussion with Sneha Rao, Principal Product Manager, Core Infrastructure at Spotify and Kief Morris, Global Lead for Infrastructure Engineering at ThoughtWorks. Both speakers come from an infrastructure background focusing on optimizing how infrastructure is managed with GitOps to enhance developer productivity. Kief literally wrote the book on it: “Infrastructure as Code.” Watch as the three discuss the evolution of IaaC, real-world practices, approaches, and how GitOps design patterns can alleviate developer pain points when it comes to infrastructure, configuration management, and more. Be sure to check out Spotify’s open source platform for building developer portals: Backstage.
Other notable talks on GitOps tools and technologies:
How to Apply GitOps on Infrastructure (For Real)
Viktor Farcic
Viktor explored Crossplane combined with Flux and Argo CD as a potential solution for all your infrastructure needs and to see whether it fits into the broader Kubernetes ecosystem.
GitOps and Runtime Security – Your Cookies Need a New Recipe
Dan “POP” Papandrea (Director of Opensource Community and Ecosystem at Sysdig)
Runtime Security is hard. Tools like Falco and Flux individually are great…combined in proven “recipes” that address current and future concerns are key. Dan uses cookie baking as an analogy for how to combine the tools in ways you can bring home and “bake in your own oven.” The story of GitOps is that it allows for sustainable, collaborative maintenance of many workloads across your compute clusters. The power of Kubernetes is that it gives you API’s to express how these workloads should behave. It’s possible to ensure that these workloads stay secure by keeping runtime security rules in Git.
Implementing Continuous Deployment in Kubernetes
Miguel Fontanilla (Sr DevOps Engineer at Sennder) & Jose Talavera (Solutions Architect at Weaveworks)
Several GitOps tools are presented (ArgoCD, FluxCD, Helm), and compared based on on a set of parameters (Observability, Scalability, Simplicity, Automation, Secrets Encryption, Flexibility, Continuous Integration) that are important when planning your Continuous Delivery use-case.
Visualizing the GitOps Journey of a container
Samiya Akhtar (Software Engineer at Microsoft)
Visualize a comprehensive dashboard view of a container’s journey from code check-in to deployment on Kubernetes clusters and concrete patterns for testing in production with GitOps and deployment rings. Check out Microsoft’s open source project Spektate (a GitOps observability tool that provides a dashboard with a tabular view into the most recent deployments) and Bedrock (automation for production Kubernetes Clusters with a GitOps Workflow).
So Many GitOps Tools, So Little Time: GitOps on AWS Best Practices
Paul Roberts (Principal Solutions Architect at Amazon)
There are so many tools today allowing developers to ease the deployment of their applications and handle lifecycle operations for their K8S clusters. In this talk, Paul shares his own ‘how it started...how it’s going’ deployment journey and what tools, best practices, and lessons learned from working with AWS’s largest customers who are solving this problem.
Orchestrating SLO-driven Multi-stage Delivery with Keptn: Merging GitOps and Data-driven Delivery
Jürgen Etzlstorfer (Technology Strategist at Dynatrace)
Keptn maintainer Jürgen Etzlstorfer shows how GitOps and event-based tooling can be combined to build a multi-stage delivery platform that is open for tool integrations and he will share how this approach is already adopted in the CNCF ecosystem.
Using Source Code Management Patterns to Configure and Secure your Kubernetes Clusters
Giovanni Galloro (Customer Engineer at Google)
Learn how to set up a git repository, from scratch, to centrally manage, with Anthos Config Management, all the configurations and security policies of multiple Kubernetes clusters in different environments, using git as the source of truth and applying the processes typically used in source code lifecycle. Giovanni also explores what’s possible to do with ACM Policy Controller, based on Open Policy Agent Gatekeeper, and configure constraints to enforce many of the possible security policies that an enterprise organization would require.
GitOps at scale using Fleet
Saiyam Pathak (Director of Technical Evangelism at Civo)
Walk through getting started with Rancher’s Fleet with an overview of Fleet, its Architecture, how to add and configure clusters, and how to deploy an application across multiple clusters
GitOpsify All The Things 🔨 – Tools, Apps, Even Your Organization and Teams!
Cansu Kavili Örnek & Donal Spring (both SREs at Red Hat)
A GitOps approach can provide a better experience for creating repeatable environments and tooling for new teams as well as existing ones. It can also deliver a better production experience for migrating existing applications and quick adoption for dynamic team structures. In this talk, Cansu & Donal share how they implemented this approach, the benefits gained for a market leading Airline, and the limitations and pitfalls encountered when driving GitOps adoption in a heavily siloed organization.
Next steps
Be sure to check out all the videos in the GitOps Days 2021 Playlist, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more informational content around GitOps!
We’ll see you October 12 at GitOpsCon North America 2021 (co-located with KubeCon NA 2021 in Los Angeles).
