The Software Development Process is a long journey. Multiple software application components must be developed simultaneously within a short timeline. In this article, we'll look at DevOps and GitOps, compare their similarities and differences, and how they work together.

Git as a Delivery Technique

Git as a delivery mechanism enables you to store your infrastructure as code in a centralized repository. This means that most of your infrastructure configuration is inside your codebase. For example, using a command, you can deploy an application hosted on AWS directly from your codebase.

GitOps

GitOps is a great framework for teams looking to automate infrastructure. GitOps uses a git repository as the source of truth for infrastructure definitions, and it’s an operational practice that uses Git. In GitOps, we are leveraging the version control system, review system, and history to automate the deployment process for production environments. The GitOps process is done using continuous delivery and automated pipelines, which also happens on the application deployment.

In the GitOps process, Git pull requests are used to verify and automatically deploy system infrastructure changes.

Infrastructure as Code

GitOps uses a Git repository as the main source of truth for infrastructure configurations. IAC lets you define your infrastructure and keep it in source control systems like Git. Infrastructure as Code is the provisioning and managing of infrastructure (networks, virtual machines, and load balancers) through code instead of doing it manually. In IaC with GitOps, you’ll most often define the configuration of your computing environment using a declarative model. When the process is defined, the infra will be deployed using an automation tool like CTO.ai.

What is DevOps

DevOps is a development culture that focuses on producing quality products as efficiently as possible. DevOps automates the whole software development process, thereby increasing efficiency and reducing costs. DevOps aims to improve communication between the development and operations teams.

How GitOps Integrates with DevOps

The collaboration between GitOps and DevOps reduces friction between team processes and accelerates the development cycle, enabling faster software delivery with quicker feedback. Teams can easily implement the existing process of Infrastructure as code (IAC), version control, and CI/CD pipelines. GitOps accelerates existing DevOps practice by reducing the risks of deploying bad infrastructure using pull/merge requests.

GitOps is a DevOps practice that shares the same principles such as automation, continuous improvement, and collaboration. GitOps processes let organizations quickly experiment with new infrastructure configurations by writing declarative code and pushing it to a repo; if any unexpected behavior happens, you can revert to previous versions using Git history.

Key Differences

Characteristics DevOps GitOps
Philosophy Team success, regardless of what tools to use Relies on a particular tool (Git) as a source control system
Technique Depends on supplying best practices that can be generally applied to every process within an organization Leverages Git to pull requests to verify and automatically deploy system infrastructure
Approach Declarative and Prescriptive approaches Declarative approach
Tool CI/CD and GitOps tools like CTO.ai Version control tools like Git

Conclusion

DevOps and GitOps offer a structure and framework that can speed software delivery and improve reliability with visibility across any cluster, cloud, and on-premise environment. GitOps enhances established DevOps strategies, making experimentation more straightforward and automating infrastructure deployment faster. Both of these approaches share the same concepts, but they do not necessitate one another. Teams with DevOps methodology don’t need to use GitOps - and teams without DevOps can still use GitOps.

Implementing GitOps and DevOps strategy is an experience, and CTO.ai can help you and your team teach your goals faster.  Explore how CTO.ai can onboard your DevOps and GitOps efforts.