Increase development velocity and deployment reliability with GitOps

Continuous Application Delivery at Cloud-Native Speed

As the pace of software development accelerates, automating application delivery becomes imperative. Automation gives organizations better control, increases development velocity, and bolsters deployment confidence. Weave GitOps seamlessly integrates this need for automation, offering meticulous control through progressive delivery methodologies like A/B testing, blue-green deployments, and canary releases.

Summary

With the surge in cloud-native technologies and the increasing reliance on Kubernetes, organizations grapple with deployment challenges that dramatically hinder their ability to deliver code. Deployments are manual and error-prone, and marked by inconsistent infrastructure configurations. The ensuing friction between Developer and Ops teams frequently results in bottlenecks and delays. Moreover, there’s considerable time and effort spent on creating and maintaining a patchwork of tools, detracting developers from their primary task: writing code.

Enter Continuous and Progressive Application Delivery with Weave GitOps. Weave GitOps, a state-of-the-art GitOps platform powered by Flux CD, redefines how organizations approach deployment, by automating all the necessary steps to deploy code to production while adhering to GitOps principles. By automating processes, progressively deploying code, ensuring consistency, and offering real-time insights, Weave GitOps offers a holistic solution that champions efficiency, transparency, and agility in the cloud-native ecosystem.

Weaveworks GitOps is a set of processes which everyone is already familiar with, so the on-boarding processes are negligible, and there’s less load on the team to learn new tooling. It’s incredibly enabling, whilst being almost invisible day to day, as it just sits there doing what we need!” - John Clarke, Director of Software Development, GFS - learn more.

Weave GitOps: Accelerated Delivery, with Precision and Control

GitOps puts Git at the center of the Application Delivery pipeline. With GitOps, every part of the deployment configuration and application delivery is stored in Git so there’s a single source of truth.

Let’s explore how Weave GitOps manages automated deployments.

  • When a developer commits a change, it triggers the CI process, resulting in a new container image being added to the container registry. 
  • The deployment agent in Weave GitOps, Flux CD, is always listening for any resource changes committed to the container registry. 
  • If a new image is detected, it deploys the changes automatically to the production cluster. 
  • In case of a faulty deployment or image, the developer can easily revert by rolling back in Git.

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GitOps feels like the right way to manage Kubernetes clusters. Other pre-containerization CI/CD tools are flakey, fragile and take up valuable time - engineers should focus on solving code problems, and not on the deployment process.” - Garry Wilson, Site Reliability Team Lead, Curve - learn more.

Weave GitOps for Continuous and Progressive Application Delivery

Flagger, an open-source tool that is purpose-built to manage the progressive delivery of applications, is part of Weave GitOps. Flagger integrates with service meshes like Istio, Linkerd, or Kuma to control the traffic flow between the multiple versions of an application. The service mesh tools allow you to set traffic-splitting policies that split traffic by percentage.

Some of the features include:

  • Automated Deployment with predefined deployment templates.
  • End-to-end visibility of GitOps pipelines with GitOps pipelines.
  • DORA Metrics dashboard.
  • Automated Canary and Blue/Green Deployments.
  • Security and compliance built-in with policy-as-code.

Flexible, Safe, and Automated Deployments

Continuous deployment automation with an integrated feedback and control loop speeds up your mean time to deployment (MTTD) by supporting more frequent releases. Declarative definitions kept in Git enable developers to use familiar workflows, reducing the time it takes to spin up new development or test environments to deploy new features. Some of the other benefits include:

  • Accelerated Deployments: Continuous deployment automation, paired with integrated feedback, accelerates mean time to deployment (MTTD), enabling more frequent releases and a swift introduction of new features to end users.
  • Native Tooling: Leveraging Git and its associated web services (like GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket) means developers operate in a familiar environment, enhancing productivity by eliminating the learning curve of new tools.
  • Self-Serve Operations: Weave GitOps provides developers the autonomy to manage app operations, including handling their own pods and namespaces directly within Git. This fosters innovation without compromising security, promoting a more independent and efficient development process.
  • Rapid Error Rollbacks: With the entire system snapshot in every Git commit, reverting to a previous working version becomes effortless. Weave GitOps ensures seamless rollouts to specific environments, enhancing system resilience.
  • Progressive Delivery: Weave GitOps, in collaboration with Flagger, offers a robust framework for managing progressive deployment strategies such as Blue/Green, canary, and A/B testing deployments ensuring safe and predictable deployments.
  • Automated Multi-Cloud Deployments: Weave GitOps facilitates complex multi-cloud deployments across diverse cloud platforms and clusters. This automation eases the operational burden, ensuring deployments are efficient and reliable.

To learn more on the benefits of GitOps enabled pipelines, visit our Guide to GitOps.


Why Weaveworks

As creators of Flux CD, Flagger, and GitOps, Weaveworks has empowered developer and platform teams to build robust software, faster and more reliably. Weaveworks offers comprehensive and holistic solutions for teams starting out on their cloud-native journey. Our GitOps platforms - Weave GitOps Assured, Weave GitOps Enterprise - instantly simplify and accelerate delivery with complete delivery pipelines. Security and compliance can also be built-in, with 100s out of the box policies, enforced with our Weave Policy Engine. Our progressive delivery capabilities mitigate risk and empower developers to confidently release code to production more frequently. Self-service GitOps templates makes it easy for platform teams to spin up configurations and resources, maintaining consistency across production environments. Explore Weave GitOps Enterprise features in depth in this blog: “Empowering Platform & Application Teams: A Closer Look at Weave GitOps Enterprise Features.”

Get Started Today

Weave GitOps makes GitOps a reality by implementing the core principles of GitOps. It enables declarative infrastructure, complete pipeline automation, and built-in security guardrails as every change to the system is versioned and audit-ready.  Try Weave GitOps open source at no cost to experience or schedule a demo for Weave GitOps Enterprise continuous application delivery at cloud-native speed.

Discover Weave GitOps Enterprise Getting Started with Weave GitOps open source

Whitepaper: How GitOps Enables a Continuous Application Lifecycle

We take a deep look at the true definition of continuous delivery, and how GitOps enables it. We also take you through all the important tools that you’ll need to learn about like Helm, Flux, Flagger, and of course Weave GitOps.

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