GitOps Software Development Principles – And the Benefits for the Entire Organization

The GitOps model for software development is a boon to productivity and software security. Companies that aren’t embracing it are missing a huge opportunity to release better software faster and with lower risk. This benefits the entire organization by reducing the possibility of everything from buggy software to cyberattacks. Here’s a bit of history to explain what GitOps is, how it has evolved, why developers love it, and why businesses should too.

History of DevOps

DevOps was created about a decade ago to bridge the longstanding gap between software development and IT operations. Traditionally, these two groups worked in silos: developers focused on writing code and adding new features, while the operations team was responsible for deploying and maintaining the software in production environments. This separation often led to miscommunication, conflicting objectives, and delays. Developers aimed for rapid innovation, sometimes introducing changes that could destabilize the system, whereas operations prioritized system stability and uptime, often resisting frequent changes.

DevOps addressed these challenges by fostering a culture of collaboration and shared responsibility. By integrating development and operations practices, teams could work more cohesively throughout the entire software lifecycle — from coding and testing to deployment and monitoring. Automation tools and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines became central to this approach, enabling faster and more reliable software releases. This not only improved efficiency but also enhanced the ability to quickly respond to customer feedback and market changes.

Since its introduction, DevOps has grown from a niche practice into a cornerstone of modern software development and IT operations, which reflects the industry's need to deliver software more rapidly and reliably in an increasingly complex technological landscape. One significant development in DevOps has been the proliferation and maturation of tools that enhance automation and scalability. The introduction of containerization technologies like Docker in 2013 revolutionized application packaging and deployment, enabling consistency across different environments. Kubernetes, open-sourced by Google in 2015, became the standard for orchestrating containerized applications at scale. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform and configuration management tools like Ansible and Puppet have allowed teams to manage and provision infrastructure programmatically, increasing efficiency and reducing errors.

The Role and Principles of GitOps

The scope of DevOps has also expanded to incorporate additional disciplines. One of the most important of these is GitOps. Git-based workflows enable the management of software delivery operations and infrastructure. It treats infrastructure configurations as code that can be version-controlled and audited. This has created a single source of truth for infrastructure and application deployment, which has been critical to streamlining and automating the continuous delivery process for greater reliability and efficiency.

The principles of GitOps are clear and create a tightly controlled and reliable workflow:

• Declarative configuration is at the heart of GitOps. It enables developers to replace the manual configuration of infrastructure and applications with all configurations defined as code. This approach ensures a reliable, auditable, and repeatable state for the system and enables version control to serve as the basis for continual improvement of the state.
• Version control is made possible by Git, which manages and stores the declarative configurations so that every system modification is recorded. This history of changes enables frictionless rollbacks to a previous state while also ensuring accountability and traceability.
• Automated delivery is what enables GitOps to apply the declared configurations to the target environment and continuously ensure that the actual state of the environment remains in sync with the declared configurations as defined in Git.
• Self-healing is a core GitOps principle that ensures that when the desired Git state is not in sync with the actual environment state, any discrepancies are automatically and immediately corrected.
• Continuous deployment integration of GitOps with the existing CI/CD pipelines ensures that whenever new changes are committed to the Git repository, the deployment process is automatically triggered to ensure updates are applied consistently across environments.

Benefits of GitOps

The benefits of implementing these GitOps principles impact developers, security teams, business operations, and ultimately software end users. GitOps delivers:

• Improved security in the form of minimized access to production environments, with all modifications made through Git, which reduces the possibility of unauthorized changes. Pull requests and code reviews ensure that all modifications are evaluated before they are implemented.
• Enhanced consistency and reliability by defining the desired state as code, which imposes deployment consistency across all environments. In addition, automated reconciliation continuously ensures the desired state is maintained, which lowers the risk of configuration drift and increases reliability.
• Increased developer productivity by streamlining deployment processes, so developers can spend their time writing code instead of maintaining the infrastructure.
• Accelerated failure recovery by enabling rapid reversion to a previous healthy state via a simple Git operation, which keeps downtime to an absolute minimum.
• Massive scalability thanks to the declarative configurations and automated processes that effortlessly keep deployments manageable and consistent.
• Enhanced collaboration and knowledge sharing by enabling teams to collaborate on configuring templates, reviewing changes, and developing and sharing best practices.

Secure GitOps

While developers loved the ease and speed of initial GitOps deployments, the rest of the organization became afraid of the risks of bad or insecure releases getting into production. For example, in a typical workflow with a standard GitOps setup, developers check their code changes in Git, triggering a Jenkins build. Once the build is successful, the artifact is sent to the repository. Argo CD then detects this new build and automatically deploys the artifact to the production environment. This process ensures continuous deployment but lacks critical security checks. 

Recently, businesses have begun adding Secure GitOps processes that impose guardrails on GitOps, with each release checked for security issues behind the scenes before it is deployed. In a secure GitOps workflow, when a new build is detected, a comprehensive security scan is triggered, and the results are evaluated against an organization’s policies. If violations are found, the deployment is blocked, and the issue that needs addressing is sent to the appropriate team. This ensures that only secure and compliant code makes it to production.

Conclusion

While organizations increasingly recognize the value of DevOps practices for increased efficiency and reliability, it is really the GitOps model that provides the necessary framework that makes this possible. GitOps delivers greater developer productivity and software reliability, and when a secure GitOps workflow is added, the entire organization benefits from reducing the range of risks inherent in vulnerable software — from user frustration to data breaches and regulatory fines.