Given that developers widely use Git today, it’s no surprise that GitOps has gained immense popularity. DevOps teams leverage GitOps to simplify app management and deployment by utilizing Git’s version control. With GitOps, Git drives every change, enabling teams to automate tasks, enhance collaboration, and achieve reliable, scalable results.
This post outlines five key GitOps best practices that are crucial for every developer to understand. These recommended practices ensure safe and stable deployments, boost efficiency, and minimize errors. As a result, you’ll deliver apps more quickly and consistently.
Boost Your DevOps Game: 5 GitOps Best Practices You Can’t Ignore
To fully leverage GitOps, teams should adopt best practices that are consistent with its fundamental principles. These procedures ensure safe and effective deployments, improve manageability, and streamline workflows.
1. Distinct repositories for code and configuration
Keeping your configurations and code in separate repositories offers several key advantages. You can make changes to the configuration without needing a full program rebuild, which only occurs when you alter the application code.
Maintaining distinct repositories acknowledges that different teams manage code and configuration files at various stages of the lifecycle in many organizations. Waiting for one change to get approval can slow down progress, and disagreements over merges can further delay development. This separation also helps prevent disruptions to automated CI/CD pipelines.
2. Use directories rather than branches
Promoting changes across branching environments is complicated, and tracking environmental branches is challenging. This is due to the fact that modifications made to one branch should not always be incorporated into all other branches. Cherry-picking, or altering branches one at a time as they grow, requires a lot of manual labor.
This procedure is sluggish and error-prone. Using a manual approach might cause code drift to rapidly develop as an application grows. Soon, this drift may become uncontrollable. The settings for every environment are kept safe and distinct by using development directories rather than branches.
3. Adopt a trunk-based development strategy
Follow GitOps guidelines by implementing branches within a trunk-based development model. This approach simplifies the process by creating, merging, and then removing branches.
By doing so, you can avoid the complexity of managing multiple branches. Development takes place on a single branch derived from the trunk. Once the pull request receives all necessary approvals, the branch merges back into the trunk and is subsequently removed.
4. Define and implement security rules and policy management protocols
The risk-spreading nature of branches makes them a preferred tool for developers. The entire ecosystem won’t be impacted if something goes wrong; just that one branch would. Combining trunk-based development and GitOps leads to single-branch application development.
Establish fundamental branch protection guidelines. These guidelines contribute to the trunk’s security. They prevent unauthorized or inadvertent alterations from entering the public sphere. Make use of security fundamentals like vulnerability scanning and frequent code reviews.
5. Ensure all relevant teams approve changes
One primary branch is more likely to contain errors in a trunk-based development architecture. Any team or department that may be impacted by a change should be allowed to approve it. Requiring a minimum number of approvals for each merge is a common mandate in GitOps teams.
Nonetheless, requests should be reviewed by all impacted teams. Then go one step further. Use role-based access control (RBAC) to specify which individuals are authorized to approve changes.
Canarys helps you to adopt GitOps Quicker
Teams can quickly adopt GitOps concepts using Canarys. This tool requires minimal resources, allowing small teams to achieve faster and more reliable solutions.