At Codefresh, we are fortunate to hear from customers of all sizes and nearly every industry. A common interest is visibility into deployments and their respective environments. As a company filled with software enthusiasts and developers, this strongly resonates with our culture and our passion for empowering developers. Visibility has been an area of continuous improvement for Codefresh and something we are committed to being the best at.
Microservices are powerful, but it isn’t a secret that they come with many challenges. Codefresh is acutely aware of this as we built our platform on microservices. We know what it means to maintain a fast-moving and complex software service that must remain highly available. One of the most common challenges we deal with is maintaining complex relationships at deployment time among individual microservices.
GitOps has been getting traction as a cloud-native approach to continuous deployment, leveraging Git for version control. If executed well, GitOps can bring benefits such as automation of your continuous deployment pipeline, lower downtimes, consistency of workflows, and more.
Software development is changing rapidly. On one hand, you must quickly adapt to evolving requirements, while on the other, your applications need to operate continuously without downtime. DevOps helps you quickly adapt to changes. Among other initiatives, continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) are intgegral to any DevOps practice.
GitOps is growing in popularity. You’ve probably seen it mentioned on Reddit or dev.to. But what the heck is GitOps? Broadly speaking, GitOps takes the principles of Git and CI-powered workflows favored by software developers — commonly used to automate the process of building, testing and deploying software — and applies them to other business processes.
“What is GitOps?” – a question which has seen increasing popularity on Google searches and blog posts in the last three years. If you want to know why then read on. Quite simply, the coining of GitOps is credited to one individual, and pretty smart guy, Alexis Richardson. He’s so smart that he’s built a multi-award-winning consultancy, Weaveworks, and a bespoke product, Flux, around the GitOps concept.
Putting it simply, it is how you do DevOps in Git. You store and manage your deployments using Git repositories as the version control system for tracking changes in your applications or, as everyone likes to say, “Git as a single source of truth.”
Progressive delivery is arguably the most reliable and advanced set of deployment practices based on a simple idea. Instead of shutting down the old release and deploying a new one in its place, progressive delivery takes an iterative approach. It gradually increases the reach of a new release. That gives us quite a few benefits like zero-downtime deployments, reduced blast radius, increased security, and so on and so forth. I will not go into depth about what progressive delivery is.
In this article, we will show you how to connect ArgoCD and Codefresh so that you get the full observability experience for GitOps. ArgoCD provides the underlying deployment mechanism and Codefresh the visual dashboard to provide high-level information for deployments. We assume that the following are in place GitOps is a way to do Kubernetes cluster management and application delivery.
Today Amazon, Codefresh, GitHub, Microsoft, and Weaveworks are announcing the creation of the GitOps Working Group. This will be an open CNCF community project created inside the CNCF fluxcd GitHub organization as the initial venue for collaboration and open governance.
