GitOps Benefits

Benefits of GitOps

Teams that adopt GitOps enjoy many benefits that improve the operation of their systems. When GitOps principles are followed, it can enhance the following aspects of cloud-native applications:

• Developer productivity

• Consistency

• Stability

• Security

Developer Productivity

GitOps simplifies the task of releasing code changes because Git becomes the only avenue for introducing changes to a system. Developers must commit every change to Git, which the automation then applies to the system. This removes barriers to introducing a new change because the process is reduced to executing a few Git commands, which most developers are comfortable performing. In many projects with manual release processes, deployment steps are tacit knowledge known by only a few senior team members. With GitOps, every developer possesses the skills necessary to trigger a release, allowing changes to occur more frequently and the team’s overall productivity to increase.

Consistency

In GitOps, changes are applied to a system through automation, which means the process is repeatable and executed the same way for every release. This eliminates the potential for human error when performing a release, which is always a possibility when there are manual tasks in a deployment process. Having this single deployment model powered by automation reduces the odds that something will go wrong in a release, causing the team’s rate of successful deployments to increase.

Stability

When proposing changes to a system, they must first be presented as pull requests, which the entire team has the opportunity to review for errors before they are accepted. This can identify issues before they enter the system. If an unexpected issue does arise, Git stores a complete log of changes for inspection and teams can simply revert to the last known working commit.

Increased security

When using GitOps, there’s no need to access a system through tools like SSH because all system changes are applied by automated agents running within the system that pull any updates from Git. This can reduce the system's attack surface and increase its overall security.

The Git repository also becomes an audit log that tracks all changes made to the system, which is often important for highly regulated environments. The repository can determine when each change was made and who made or approved it. Since all changes are made through pull requests, it increases the visibility of changes that might otherwise have gone unreviewed. This presents an opportunity to detect potential security vulnerabilities that a well-intentioned team member might unknowingly introduce.