GitOps overview

What is GitOps?

GitOps is the practice of automating infrastructure management using Git as a single source of truth. GitOps was invented in 2017 by Alexis Richardson, CEO of WeaveWorks (opens new window) as a way to do Kubernetes cluster management and application delivery. NubesGen takes this further by using Terraform and GitHub Actions, giving you more power to go beyond Kubernetes to everything that Terraform can do.

How is GitOps implemented in NubesGen?

Doing a simple git push is enough to create a whole cloud infrastructure and deploy your application.

Behind-the-scenes, NubesGen uses Git, Terraform and GitHub Actions together to automate infrastructure management and code deployment.

The best way to describe it is through an example:

• Alice, a new developer, joins the project.
• Alice creates a new branch, called env-alice.
• As soon as her branch is pushed, Alice automatically has a working environment: cloud resources have been correctly created for her, her code has been deployed and is running.
• If Alice wants to modify the cloud resources, for example upgrading the database to another tier, the only command to do is git push and the environment is automatically updated.
• If Alice modifies any business code, it is also automatically built and deployed to the cloud after a git push.

What are the benefits of GitOps with NubesGen?

A unique source of truth

In each environment branch (env-alice, env-bob, env-test, env-prod...), Git is the single source of truth. It is easy to understand, test and modify the environments.

Developers are empowered to use the cloud

Even without knowing anything about the underlying cloud provider, developers are able to quickly and automatically create, modify and destroy cloud resources. This makes them far more efficient.

Advanced users still have the full power of Terraform

Advanced users can still benefit from Terraform, a well-known and beloved tool used by Ops people worldwide.

How does this work behind-the-scenes?

When choosing the GitOps option, NubesGen generates a GitHub Action next to its normal Terraform configuration.

Once committed into Git, this GitHub Action works in the following way:

• When a new branch is created, with a name starting with env- (like env-alice in our previous example), the GitHub Action runs the Terraform configuration, using the environment name.
• As a result, a specific resource group is created, with specific resources inside: they all use the environment name inside their name, and they are also tagged with it.
• When someone pushes code to the env- branch, the Terraform configuration is applied again, so the cloud resources are updated accordingly.
• After creating the cloud resources, the GitHub Action then builds the application and deploys it to the cloud.

What happens if something goes bad?

NubesGen uses the backend configuration of Terraform: it stores the state of each cloud infrastructure inside an Azure Blob container.

As a result, you can run Terraform locally and interact with your cloud resources: you can use the usual Terraform commands to modify or apply the state that you need. Then, next time a commit is pushed to the branch, Terraform will apply its configuration again.

In any case, NubesGen creates all cloud infrastructures in specific resource groups, named after the project name and the environment name that you created: if you want to destroy everything, you can just destroy the resource groups, and everything will disappear.

Next step: go to the quickstart

To setup GitOps with NubesGen, follow the GitOps with NubesGen quickstart.