Billy Yuen - GitOps and Kubernetes

As Intuit embarked on the journey from on-premises to cloud-native, the journey itself presented an opportunity to reinvent our build and deployment process. Similar to many large enterprises, our old deployment process was data-center-centric with separate QA, Ops, and Infrastructure teams. Code could take weeks to get deployed, and developers had no access to infrastructure when there were production issues. Infrastructure issues could take a long time to resolve and required many groups collaboration.

As Marianna Tessel (Intuit CTO) and Jeff Brewer (Intuit SBSEG chief architect) decided to bet big on Kubernetes and Docker, we were fortunate to be the first team to fully migrate one of our production applications with Kubernetes and Docker. Along the way, we got to reinvent our CI/CD pipeline and adopt the GitOps process. Jesse and Alex created Argo CD (CNCF incubator project) to address enterprise needs for GitOps. Todd and his team created world-class cluster management tools so we can scale out to hundreds of clusters with ease.

Having a standard like Kubernetes and Docker enables all engineers to speak a common language in terms of infrastructure and deployment. Engineers can easily contribute to other projects and deploy as soon as the development process is complete. GitOps also allows us to know exactly who and what gets changed in our environments, which is especially important if you are subject to compliance requirements. We cannot imagine going back to the old way we did deployment, and we hope that this book can help accelerate your journey to embrace GitOps!

This book turned out to be an 18-month journey that required a lot of work and additional research to tell the complete story. We believe that we have delivered what we set out to do, and it is a great book for anyone who wants to adopt GitOps and Kubernetes.

There are quite a few people wed like to thank for helping us along the way. At Manning, we would like to thank our development editor, Dustin Archibald, project editor, Deirdre Hiam, proofreader, Katie Tennant, and reviewing editor, Aleks Dragosavljevic.

We want to thank Marianna Tessel and Jeff Brewer, who provided us the opportunity and freedom to transform and experiment with GitOps and Kubernetes. We would also like to thank Pratik Wadher, Saradhi Sreegiriaju, Mukulika Kupas, and Edward Lee for their guidance throughout the process. We want to call out Viktor Farcic and Oscar Medina for their insightful contributions to the Jenkins X chapter.

To all the reviewers: Andres Damian Sacco, Angelo Simone Scotto, Bjrn Neuhaus, Chris Viner, Clifford Thurber, Conor Redmond, Diego Casella, James Liu, Jaume Lpez, Jeremy Bryan, Jerome Meyer, John Guthrie, Marco Massenzio, Matthieu Evrin, Mike Ensor, Mike Jensen, Roman Zhuzha, Samuel Brown, Satej Kumar Sahu, Sean T. Booker, Wendell Beckwith, and Zorodzayi Mukuya, we say thank you. Your suggestions helped make this a better book.

For Jeff Brewer, who inspired us all for this awesome transformation journey!

This book is intended for both Kubernetes infrastructure and operation engineers and software developers who want to deploy applications to Kubernetes through a declarative model using the GitOps process. It will benefit anyone looking to improve the stability, reliability, security, and auditability of their Kubernetes clusters while at the same time reducing operational costs through automated continuous software deployments.

Readers are expected to have a working knowledge of Kubernetes (Deployment, Pod, Service, and Ingress resources, for example) as well as an understanding of modern software development practices including continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD), revision control systems (such as Git), and deployment/infrastructure automation.

Advanced users who have successfully implemented a mature GitOps system may be better off reading a more advanced book on their chosen tool.

This book is not intended to cover all aspects of Kubernetes in depth. While we cover many Kubernetes concepts that are relevant to GitOps, readers looking for a comprehensive guide to Kubernetes should look at the other great books and online resources available on the topic.

This book describes the benefits of GitOps on Kubernetes, including flexible configuration management, monitoring, robustness, multienvironment support, and security. You will learn the best practices, techniques, and tools to achieve these benefits, which enable enterprises to use Kubernetes to accelerate application development without compromising on stability, reliability, or security.