How GitOps Brings Consistency to Multicloud Systems
Weave GitOps, helps organizations implement GitOps efficiently across multicloud systems. Read about Weave GitOps’ multicloud advantages in this post.
The popularity of multicloud infrastructure has snowballed in recent years. According to CIO magazine by mid 2021, 73% of surveyed enterprises said they were using two public clouds, and 26% were using three or more. But multi-cloud for many means embracing public cloud along with a mix of private clouds, on-premise, and edge.
Organizations leveraging public cloud vendors to run their workloads have long been plagued with vendor lock-in. Relying solely on only one public cloud vendor can become a liability in the long run. There is always innovation and competitive pricing with constant competition between major cloud vendors. As new services with much better pricing options become available, software delivery teams are left regretting their choice to go all-in on just one cloud vendor. This is especially true in times of economic uncertainty.
Another consideration is resilience to potential outages.
Any major cloud platform over the past years had suffered various outages at some point. If organizations run their applications on just a single provider, chances of experiencing such outages increase and business continuity may not persist. Having the ability of running an appliication on multiple cloud provider drastically reduces the risk and can guarantee reliability and resilience.
As organizations navigate the uncharted waters of multicloud, GitOps is the key to success.
The Multicloud Nightmare
Although multicloud has been around for a while, various challenges have prevented organizations from seeing the full benefits it offers. Different cloud vendors provide different monitoring, automation, and management tools that don’t usually integrate well with the tools of another vendor. This incompatibility makes migration and application portability extremely difficult, requiring lots of rework and need to hire andor maintain new specialized skills to support various backends. In addition organizations are exposing themselves to higher risk related to security, data or privacy issues. These are some of the main reasons for apprehension among infrastructure teams.
However, Kubernetes has made multicloud extremely achievable. With the abstraction of the underlying infrastructure, you can run multiple clusters on different cloud environments, even on-premises. And, you can simply move specific services or entire workloads without having to do any rework. Overall complexity increased but also made cost optimization and taking advantage of the benefits each cloud option provides accessible.
The Consistency Challenge
Kubernetes brings unparalleled ease to multicloud implementations. However, Kubernetes for multicloud infrastructure has its own demerits. One of the most significant issues with Kubernetes can be its complexity. On paper, Kubernetes makes it easier to manage containerized workloads and handles containers' creation, management, and destruction. But, managing Kubernetes over an expanded landscape involving various cloud vendors and environments can be highly challenging. This becomes apparent when you factor in the Kubernetes configuration, access controls, service mesh networking, and data portability.
Having consistency among multicloud platforms becomes harder to implement. Manually implementing consistency is out of the question due to the sheer effort, lack of skills and the room for human error. Security becomes a significant concern as inconsistency in policy can become a big vulnerability when the software is in production. The only effective way to automate policy implementation and consistency across multicloud is to invest in a managed GitOps solution.
Purpose-Built GitOps Solution For The Multicloud
Modern workloads are incredibly dynamic, leading to challenges if teams have to roll back specific changes. These changes might not be limited to one service or one cluster and could lead to hours of rework. What do teams do in that situation? Git repositories are vital for storing code in different versions, making it easy for teams to identify the correct code and redeploy it. However, this becomes a little daunting when teams are on strict deadlines.
To employ GitOps, teams should understand the GitOps approach. DevOps teams should take the initiative and implement GitOps from the very start for optimum results. This is where a purpose-built GitOps solution comes into play. A solution like Weave GitOps can make GitOps implementation a breeze by empowering teams with automation and dashboards that span multiple cloud platforms.
Weave GitOps is the leading GitOps solution providing continuous operations and delivery for the development and platform teams so they can focus on software delivery. All the configurations for your Kubernetess clusters, clouds, and cloud-based services are stored on a Git repository accessible by Weave GitOps. Weave GitOps constantly scans your system for unauthorized changes and ensures your workloads’ actual state matches the desired state.
According to the GitOps model, developers do not directly make changes to the configurations. Instead, they create a pull request to the Git repository, where those changes are reviewed and approved before being merged. Once those changes are merged, the GitOps agent reconciles the configuration with the production clusters.
Weave GitOps constantly checks for inconsistencies and reconciles the state of systems in production to match the desired state as declared in the Git repository. With a single control pane, teams can observe workloads irrespective of where they are hosted, even on-premise.
Make Security A Priority
Security is a significant concern in today’s software delivery landscape. Implementing security can become a challenge when DevOps and security teams are siloed. Adding security to already developed software retroactively can lead to unseen vulnerabilities in production. The DevSecOps approach helps by equipping every individual with the proper knowledge of security best practices, but that’s insufficient. Implementing security tools helps, but that’s just half the picture.
With GitOps all changes are already made only via Git, which limits direct access to Kubernetes or cloud providers. Limited and restricted access significantly reduces the attack surface and overhead of managing complex role based access control (RBAC) in Kubernetes and the cloud itself.
Weave GitOps with multicluster control plane and policy engine helps implement and manage end-to-end security across all clusters, so teams don’t have to waste time doing this manually.
With policy-as-code, Weave GitOps can maintain consistency in security configuration across all cloud platforms. Once teams declare the right security policies in the Git repository, Weave GitOps makes sure these policies are strictly followed across all public cloud platforms. This ensures zero-trust security because even the most minor change has to be declared before merging with the main branch. Unauthorized changes are immediately reverted, and only authorized ones are allowed.
The Growing Necessity
Workloads are constantly getting more complex. As an organization scales up, consistency and security become harder to achieve. The cost of failure in implementing consistency and security is extremely high. Organizations should implement the right approach and tools to ensure their infrastructure is optimized for their present workloads and the future.
As competition gets more fierce and time-to-market reduces, organizations will have to level up and ensure their infrastructure doesn’t become their biggest enemy. Tools like Weave GitOps fill precisely this gap and help boost team productivity despite the growing complexity of multicloud. Book a demo with us today.
