GitOps Benefits Drawbacks

This article reviews the key advantages and challenges associated with GitOps, providing insights for managing Kubernetes application deployments effectively.

Benefits of GitOps

GitOps offers several compelling advantages:

• It is lightweight and vendor-neutral, leveraging the open-source Git protocol to work seamlessly across diverse platforms.
• GitOps enables faster and safer deployments by ensuring immutable and reproducible environments.
• In team setups where environmental changes might occur unexpectedly, GitOps prevents unintended modifications. The GitOps operator enforces consistency by disallowing manual updates, thus eliminating configuration drift.
• In the event of a manual update, the GitOps operator automatically restores the desired state from Git.
• Developers enjoy the familiarity of using Git and CI/CD tools. The workflow remains straightforward: push the code to the repository, and a CI/CD pipeline handles testing and deployment.
• Git’s history tracking allows for easy comparison between declarative file revisions, making it simple to correlate changes with specific change requests.

Challenges of GitOps

Despite its advantages, GitOps introduces a few challenges that need to be addressed:

• Centralized Secret Management:
  GitOps does not secure secrets by default. Although it recommends storing secrets declaratively in Git repositories, operations teams must integrate additional tools to manage secrets securely.

• Repository Organization:
  As the number of microservices and environments grows, organizing Git repositories becomes complex. Decisions need to be made about whether to store source code and manifests in a single repository or use multiple repositories/branches. There is no one-size-fits-all solution—each organization must tailor this approach to fit its specific application requirements.

• Update Conflicts:
  Frequent application updates in continuous delivery environments can trigger simultaneous CI processes, leading to multiple pull requests. This may result in conflicts when several processes attempt to update the GitOps repository concurrently, often necessitating manual resolution.

• Governance and Policy Enforcement:
  Relying on pull requests (PRs) for approval can reduce the effectiveness of enforcing strict company policies after a PR is approved.

• Configuration Validation:
  Malformed YAML files or configuration errors can occur. External validation tools are essential for ensuring that manifest files meet the required standards.