Red Hat Urges GitOps Adoption in OpenShift Environments
Red Hat, Inc. today made available OpenShift GitOps and OpenShift Pipelines that are based on the Argo continuous delivery (CD) and Tekton open source projects.
Argo is being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a CD platform that runs natively on Kubernetes. Tekton is a portable framework for building DevOps pipelines that also run natively on Kubernetes. Originally developed by Google, the Tekton project is now being advanced under the auspices of the Continuous Delivery (CD) Foundation. Both the CNCF and CD Foundation are arms of the Linux Foundation.
Brian Gracely, senior director for product strategy for Red Hat Hybrid Cloud, says both offerings are part of a Red Hat effort to advance adoption of GitOps best practices that loosely couple a CD platform with a continuous integration (CI) platform rather than tightly integrating them within the same platform. That approach is essentially a more opinionated implementation of a DevOps workflow, says Gracely.
While CI is widely implemented within organizations that have embraced DevOps, the CD side of that equation has proven to be more challenging. Each target application delivery platform is unique, which results in DevOps teams having to write and maintain a lot of custom scripts. In theory, Kubernetes presents an opportunity to advance automation using a layer of common application programming interfaces (APIs) on top of multiple platforms. Rather than pushing code from a CI/CD platform, it then becomes possible for a Kubernetes cluster to automatically pull both cluster configuration and application code, in a declarative fashion, from a Git repository.
That approach also increases visibility into the state of clusters and applications to make it possible to correct deviations from the desired state, if required. IT teams can more easily track what changes were made because they are all captured in the Git repository.
OpenShift Pipelines then makes it possible to run each step of the CI/CD pipeline in its own container, which allows them to scale independently as demand for infrastructure resource ebbs and flows.
It’s not clear how many organizations are embracing GitOps just yet. Many organizations that already employ a CI/CD platform to build and deploy both microservices-based and monolithic applications tend to view Kubernetes as just another target platform. Transitioning to a Kubernetes-based GitOps workflow represents a major effort. However, as more organizations begin to roll out highly distributed microservices-based applications running on Kubernetes clusters, the number is expected to grow. Red Hat is moving to enable organizations to achieve that goal with distributions of Argo and Tekton for its OpenShift platform based on Kubernetes that can be deployed using operators that Red Hat makes available via a subscription, says Gracely.
Argo, of course, is not the only CD option when it comes to Kubernetes, but with support for Red Hat it’s likely to become a major element of a lot of GitOps workflows in the months and years ahead.
