Make Your Path to Production Secure & Predictable With Weave GitOps Pipelines

By Twain Taylor

May 09, 2023

Weave GitOps

Weave GitOps Enterprise

Pipelines are an essential component of CI/CD & GitOps. Weave GitOps Enterprise Pipelines is a better way to ensure your code follows a secure and predictable path to production.

Pipelines are a crucial component when building consistent and secure software delivery. A pipeline enables you to set your application's path to production - from development and testing to production, phases an application will touch on its way there. Weave GitOps Enterprise has recently released a Pipelines feature that enables you to easily define and quickly scale the creation and management of GitOps pipelines.

CI/CD helps you deliver cloud-native applications at a rapid pace by enabling a frictionless workflow through the development and deployment phases. For streamlining this workflow, CI/CD depends on pipelines and so does GitOps by extension. In fact, pipelines are considered one of the three pillars of the GitOps framework, along with observability and version control. Pipelines sit in the center of GitOps operations enabling you to deliver applications safely with visibility and predictability. However, pipelines come with a few challenges, such as implementation hassles, security vulnerabilities, and low reproducibility.

With multiple teams involved across the SDLC, it can lead to a lack of consistency in pipeline creation. Pipelines span different environments and setting up a pipeline will get as complicated as your system. Ad hoc, manual processes are used to create pipelines and the back and forth between multiple teams results in delayed releases. Security is an afterthought, and even if considered, every team has different security protocols, leaving many security loopholes across pipelines. Since the process is manual, it is hard to reproduce, and results in new errors and issues every time a new pipeline is created. These are just some of the challenges that Weave GitOps Enterprise Pipelines was designed to address.

Weave GitOps ‘Pipelines’

Weave GitOps Enterprise is a GitOps Automation platform that facilitates fully automated delivery so that you can seamlessly implement code changes through staging and production with predictability and visibility.

Figure: Weave GitOps Pipelines

It gives you deeper visibility into every deployment on a single screen showing information like the application version and runtime environment. This enables you to push code to production with confidence. Further, it gives platform operators control to define the specific Helm charts they want to allow as part of an environment. Besides visibility, Pipelines also allows you to transfer data between objects and set alerts in multiple clusters.

Weave GitOps Pipelines is built to be flexible and can be integrated with your existing CI setup, including Jenkins or GitHub Action.

Benefits of Weave GitOps Pipelines:

Automate code rollouts between environments without requiring the Ops team’s manual intervention.
Enhance visibility to keep control of how the code is rolled out through different environments.
Give developers the independence of choosing a specific toolkit to deploy applications at their own pace.
Automate rollback of changes in case of failures by implementing automated gates.

Optimizing Developer Productivity & Experience with Self-Service - Pipelines, Templates & Sets

Watch the Weave GitOps launch webinar recap and see the 2023.04 release features in action.

Watch now

Challenges of delivery pipelines that Weave GitOps Enterprise solves

Security, consistency, and visibility are core tenets of pipelines in ensuring the streamlined flow of code through the development lifecycle. Weave GitOps Enterprise Pipelines facilitates these traits by giving you insights into new application versions that are being rolled out across clusters and environments. This further allows you to implement security guardrails and track metrics to assess if the application is working as desired. In instances of failures, the change is abandoned with an automatic rollout of the older version.

Weave GitOps Enterprise Pipelines has been designed to give you optimized pipelines for the frictionless release of new features. Some of the concerns it addresses are listed below:

Setup

Weave GitOps Enterprise Pipelines includes features like notifications and image automation that make it easy to design pipelines. This provides a seamless way to design pipelines so that setup is much easier and faster.

Consistency

Weave GitOps Enterprise Pipelines automates end-to-end feature rollout, which guarantees consistent workflow. It gives you a status update of whatever is happening within your clusters and git. This visibility would show if the changes you rolled out in development were successfully deployed. This gives you greater confidence to implement changes continuously.

Reproducibility

With Weave GitOps Enterprise Pipelines, however, you can easily reproduce previous pipelines through YAML constructs, and make edits to them at a granular level if needed. This way, with every new application, you need not set up a new pipeline to suit the specific requirements of that application. You can simply customize and reuse an existing pipeline. This saves time and avoids duplication of work.

Bring your own CI

Weave GitOps Enterprise Pipelines doesn’t require you to change your CI setup. It comes with the flexibility of using the CI system of your choice (Jenkins, GitLab, GitHub Actions, etc) while still leveraging the best of its capabilities. This means you aren’t forced to migrate your entire CI system, which saves you a lot of time and hassle.

Predictability

By combining Pipelines with Weave GitOps Enterprise’s Workspaces feature, platform operators can lock down specific Helm releases and map them to specific clusters. This makes your pipelines more secure and predictable. This way, developers always know which cluster they need to release their application to.

See Pipelines in Action

In our latest product launch webinar, Joe Dahlquist, VP of Product Marketing, and James Wilson, Director of Product Management, have demonstrated the Pipelines features along with GitOps Sets and GitOps Templates.

Watch the webinar in its entirety or skip to some of the key highlights:

Speaker Introductions [min 2.00]
About Weaveworks [min 2:39]
Weave GitOps [min 3:34]
Product Announcements: [min 5:04]
Weaveworks Solutions [min 5:43]
New in Weave GitOps 2023.04 [min 9:12]

Pipelines [min 10:36]
GitOps Templates [min 11:32]
GitOps Sets [min 12:56]

Weave GitOps Enterprise Demo [min 14.40 - 31.40]
Q&A [min 34.33]

Automate Deployment Pipelines with Weave GitOps Enterprise Pipelines

Pipelines is a core functionality in CI/CD and GitOps. It plays a key role in making delivery cycles safe and efficient. With apps requiring continual upgrades of new features and security updates, release pipelines need to be automated to ensure that the desired state of the applications in production is maintained. Weave GitOps Enterprise Pipelines is just the solution for this challenge. More importantly, you can leverage the Weave GitOps Enterprise Pipelines feature without moving away from your current CI system, such as Jenkins, GitLab, or GitHub Actions.

Request a Demo today to see how your teams can benefit from using Pipelines.