What is the Enterprise Market Perspective of GitOps?
In the GitOps Days keynote session “GitOps is the Way to Overcome the Scaling Wall by Introducing New Operational Models? An Enterprise Market Perspective” Philippe Ensarguet, CTO of Orange Business Service discusses why enterprises want to automate infrastructure management today. Costs and scale are the driving factors.
Benefitting From a CTO’s Insights
Philippe Ensarguet, CTO at Orange Business Services, joined the GitOps Days stage to share why GitOps makes business sense. As CTO of a major company that provides many services including telecommunications, IT, digital, and networking, Philippe is in an executive position to understand which technology decisions help with the bottom line. As a result, Philippe’s job is to have an ear to the ground of tech and open source ecosystems and to use that knowledge to decide on strategies, impact, and opportunities for Orange.
For many of us who don’t have the same level of access as Philippe, his GitOps Days 2022 keynote provides critical insights. Watch the keynote, “GitOps is the Way to Overcome the Scaling Wall by Introducing New Operational Models? An Enterprise Market Perspective”, where he shares learnings from consulting with other CTOs and the heads of technology from Orange’s customers and partners. Philippe is also advisor to investment funds, VC funds at Orange, and technology-forward companies such as Weaveworks. In the video, you’ll hear how Philippe brings together research and insights showing how all of the data points to why GitOps is a core part of both technology and business needs for organizations.
Because of this, it’s no surprise that a recent New Stack article states that GitOps is one of the Top 5 Trends in the Cloud Native ecosystem. Philippe emphasizes that the technological benefits of GitOps such as automation, self-service, collaboration, and velocity all contribute to bringing business value in the form of improved operations, pricing, and competitive advantage. Because of both the technical and business benefits, GitOps is an essential part of every company’s DevOps evolution.
Cloud Native Trends
More specifically, one trend that Philippe observes and experiences is the need to manage their infrastructure less and less. It’s essential to make the onboarding of operations automated. This means that they are relying increasingly on solutions that provide automation, leveraging serverless technologies, and moreover doing so at scale. It is imperative that infrastructure in the enterprise is automated and self-healing to enable rapid growth.
In addition, Philippe shares insights from colleagues as well as from conversations at events such as the recent AWS ReInvent that all of these needs become even more relevant for enterprise companies who are migrating to the cloud.
Leveraging GitOps to lower the cost of operations, allows companies such as Orange to focus on the success and competitive edge via developer velocity. GitOps and Cloud native approaches give them breathing room to improve the developer experience, which then increases developer productivity. They do so by setting up a CICD pipeline that minimizes manual deploys, meets the standards of the security and operational teams, and that provides capabilities such as drift management. These all add up to business benefits of building reliable, secure, and feature-rich products that meet the needs of the customer.
Orange’s GitOps Journey
Philippe mentioned the 4 pillars of GitOps that have been outlined by the GitOps Working Group in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation:
- A Declarative system
- A system that is Versioned and Immutable
- One that is Pulled Automatically
- The system is Continuously Reconciled
As you’ve seen from many GitOps practitioners at past GitOps Days, taking small steps with any of the pillars is a great start. GitOps, especially with the CNCF project, Flux, works with your existing technologies and tools, and can bring benefits at every step of the way. For Orange’s journey, Philippe shared at the end of the keynote that they are continually improving the developer experience, their use of CAPI with hybrid architectures such as using bare metal with VMs, and their ability to modernize observability and open telemetry.
Orange Business Services is a Eur 7.4 billion company with over 21,000 employees. It is a subsidiary of Orange S.A., a company worth more than Eur 42.5 billion with 148,000 employees around the world. If GitOps as an approach and Flux the technology can support the security, reliability, and scale needs of an enterprise company such as Orange, they can certainly work for you. Watch this fantastic keynote from GitOps Days 2022 to hear all of the details from a CTO’s perspective and share it to accelerate your company’s GitOps journey.
Here’s the video in its entirety if you’d like to watch from start to finish:
Next Steps
We’ll be publishing more blog posts along with videos from the event to our GitOps Days 2022 Playlist, so stay tuned for more as they become available. And don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel!
If you missed the live session, no worries, the sessions are still available to watch on demand
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