Introduction to CI/CD and GitOps
Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) form the backbone of modern software engineering. They enable teams to ship code faster, safer, and more reliably.
What is CI/CD?
Continuous Integration (CI) is the practice of automating the integration of code changes from multiple contributors into a single software project. It involves automatically building, testing, and validating code every time a commit is made.
Continuous Deployment (CD) automates the delivery of applications to selected infrastructure environments. It ensures that any code that passes the CI phase is automatically released into production or staging environments.
The GitOps Paradigm
GitOps takes CI/CD a step further by using Git as the single source of truth for declarative infrastructure and applications. With GitOps, changes to the application state are made via pull requests, and software agents (like ArgoCD) automatically reconcile the cluster state to match the Git repository.
Key Principles of GitOps
- Declarative: The entire system is described declaratively.
- Version Controlled: The canonical desired system state is versioned in Git.
- Automatically Applied: Approved changes that can be automatically applied to the system.
- Software Agents: Software agents ensure correctness and alert on divergence.