Sneha Narang, Carol Pereira, and Lauren Britton contributed to this blog post. Kubernetes adoption is on the rise because it helps organizations improve software development with increased flexibility and efficiency while controlling cloud costs. In fact, our State of Kubernetes 2022 report shows 62 percent of respondents claiming that Kubernetes increases the flexibility of applications and 54 percent agreeing it offers better developer efficiency.

Earlier this year, when Codefresh announced the first course in our GitOps for Argo certification program – GitOps Fundamentals – we had high hopes that the course would satisfy the community’s pent-up demand for practical GitOps knowledge. To meet this demand, we designed a course that features lab environments to dramatically improve the learning experience. Each student gets a lab environment pre-configured with everything they need to learn GitOps using Argo CD.

GitOps modernizes software management and operations by allowing developers to declaratively manage infrastructure and code using a single source of truth, usually a Git repository. Many development teams and organizations have adopted GitOps procedures to improve the creation and delivery of software applications. For a GitOps initiative to work, an orchestration system like Kubernetes is crucial.

GitOps takes DevOps best practices used for application development (such as version control and CI/CD) and applies them to infrastructure automation. In GitOps, the Git repository serves as the source of truth and the CD pipeline is responsible for building, testing, and deploying the application code and the underlying infrastructure. Nowadays, an application is not just code running on infrastructure that you own and operate.

In an ideal world, developers would be able to release new products and features from development environments into production extremely fast while also not having to stress about breaking prod. Achieving this combination of development speed while also maintaining software reliability requires having the right toolchain and automation in place.