GitOps Best Practices I Wish I Had Known Before

Navigating the complexities of GitOps can initially seem overwhelming, akin to managing chaos in a rapidly changing environment, but with experience and the right practices, it becomes a powerful tool for managing Kubernetes at scale. Key principles of GitOps include maintaining Git as the single source of truth, favoring declarative over imperative configurations, and employing pull-based deployments for security and efficiency. Best practices suggest separating application code from deployment configurations, using directories instead of branches for environment management, and ensuring changes are validated before merging to prevent errors. Emphasizing the importance of tagging with commit SHAs over using mutable tags like "latest," the text also underscores automating drift detection and reconciliation to maintain consistency between the Git repository and the actual cluster state. Progressive delivery is recommended for safer rollouts, and policy-as-code is advocated as an automated safeguard against rule violations. Bridging Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with GitOps is crucial, using patterns like the gitops-bridge to seamlessly integrate cloud resource management with Kubernetes deployments. The text concludes by encouraging a pragmatic approach to GitOps, advising against dogmatic adherence to principles and suggesting iterative implementation of practices to address specific pain points while acknowledging that even large adopters like Intuit modify GitOps principles to suit their needs.