The Benefits of a GitOps Model for a Cloud-Native Environment

GitOps and CI/CD provide significant benefits to a Kubernetes environment from an immutable audit trail to pre-deployment testing. However, Kubernetes, initially, did not make use of a GitOps model but instead provides its own deployment path using writes to the Kubernetes API. There are a lot of Kubernetes users who are comfortable with the native Kubernetes API and the related CLI tool ‘kubectl’. Due to the way the Kubernetes API is designed, it is possible to use a GitOps CI/CD chain, or a kubctl API call to make a modification to your Kubernetes cluster, but you can’t do both. The current tooling makes a kubectl call incompatible with GitOps. In this talk, we’ll cover the pros and cons of each model, and why they don’t play so well together. We also will discuss some options we are considering on how to harmonize both paths, and, if the code is ready in time, maybe even have a demo to show.