Cloud Native Application Delivery Using GitOps

Summary

The way that applications are being built and delivered has changed dramatically in recent years with the growing trend toward cloud native software. As part of this movement toward the infrastructure and orchestration that powers your project being defined in software, a new approach to operations is gaining prominence. Commonly called GitOps, the main principle is that all of your automation code lives in version control and is executed automatically as changes are merged. In this episode Victor Farcic shares details on how that workflow brings together developers and operations engineers, the challenges that it poses, and how it influences the architecture of your software. This was an interesting look at an emerging pattern in the development and release cycle of modern applications.

Announcements

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• Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Victor Farcic about using GitOps practices to manage your application and your infrastructure in the same workflow

Interview

• Introductions
• How did you get introduced to Python?
• Can you start by giving an overview of what GitOps is?
• What are the architectural or design elements that developers need to incorporate to make their applications work well in a GitOps workflow?
• What are some of the tools that facilitate a GitOps approach to managing applications and their target environments?
• What are some useful strategies for managing local developer environments to maintain parity with how production deployments are architected?
• As developers acquire more resonsibility for building the automation to provision the production environment for their applications, what are some of the operations principles that they need to understand?
• What are some of the development principles that operators and systems administrators need to acquire to be effective in contributing to an environment that is managed by GitOps?
• What are the areas for collaboration and dividing lines of responsibility between developers and platform engineers in a GitOps environment?
• Beyond the application development and deployment, what are some of the additional concerns that need to be built into an application in order for it to be manageable and maintainable once it is in production?
• What are some of the organizational principles that contribute to a successful implementation of GitOps?
• What are some of the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen GitOps employed?
• What have you found to be the most challenging aspects of creating a scalable and maintainable GitOps practice?
• When is GitOps the wrong choice, and what are the alternatives?
• What resources do you recommend for anyone who wants to dig deeper into this subject?

Keep In Touch

• LinkedIn
• Blog
• @vfarcic on Twitter

Picks

• Tobias
  • Pulumi
    • Podcast Episode
• Victor
  • Loki

Links

• GitOps
• CodeFresh
• Kubernetes
• DevOps Paradox Podcast
• Perl
• Cloud Native
• ArgoCD
• Flux
• Observability
• Prometheus
• Helm
• KNative
• MiniKube
• Viktor’s Udemy Books and Courses
• Viktor’s YouTube channel

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA