March 2022 Summaries

GitOps is a Continuous Delivery strategy where our infrastructure and application configuration are defined as code and stored centrally in a version control system like Git. It uses Git as a single source of truth, meaning it relies on the version control system to configure your infrastructure and applications. In a traditional DevOps CI/CD pipeline, an external tool like Jenkins is responsible for applying Kubernetes manifests into the cluster, but in a GitOps workflow, an agent installed in the cluster checks the Git repository for changes and updates the cluster accordingly. This approach allows for faster and safer deployments, ease of performing rollbacks, better traceability, and easier elimination of configuration drifts. ArgoCD is an open-source tool that enables GitOps continuous delivery for Kubernetes, allowing developers to define their application configuration as code in a Git repository and have ArgoCD update the cluster to match the defined configuration. It also allows multiple clusters to be managed with a single installation. The tutorial covers installing ArgoCD, deploying applications using different strategies such as declarative approach, helm, and command line tool, and understanding some key concepts like application health and sync strategies.

A canary release is a software testing technique that gradually rolls out new versions of an application to a small subset of users before making it available to the entire user base. This approach helps mitigate risks associated with introducing new features or updates by allowing developers to monitor and collect feedback from early adopters. Canary releases are commonly used in cloud native applications, where multiple microservices change independently at different rates. Key benefits include reduced system blast radius for operational issues and minimized negative impact on a large percentage of users. However, challenges may arise when managing incompatibilities between API versions or database schema changes. Automation is crucial to ensure the efficiency and accuracy of canary releases.