Cloud Native with Google Cloud CI/CD: GitOps Workflow

• Remove blockers of software delivery excellence.
• Slow delivery: Your software team can’t respond swiftly to customer needs.
• Manual deployment errors: Your delivery performance is exposed by error-prone and time-consuming manual deployments.
• Lack of auditability: Your software development processes don’t provide a clear audit trail for compliance purposes.
• Difficulty rolling back changes: Your team is reluctant to deploy because it is risky and hard to recover from problems.
• Lack of collaboration: Your team members don’t see what changes have been made, by whom, and when.

• Rapid deployments: You deploy changes quickly with Git-triggered workflows.
• Cost-effective delivery: You’re super-powering your GKE setup with open-source technologies like Argo or Flux.
• Stability and Reliability: Your team delivers confidently through repeatability (Git code) and the elimination of human (related) errors.
• Scalability: Your teams will scale their operations as they grow. Adding new team members and managing deployments across multiple environments is easy.
• Developer experience: The automated deployment process eliminates tedious manual tasks. Your team concentrates on developing important features.
• Better collaboration: Your teams work together more effectively. They use a centralised source of truth for code and infrastructure.
  
  

Step 1: GAP analysis on current CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure

You work with a balanced team of engineers, architects and consultants to plot where you are, define your desired end state and methodologically plan the path to achieve them.

• Readiness assessment of the source control repositories and recent release and branch strategy.
• Understand the environments and the deployment lifecycle of your applications.
• Measure the divergence between running applications and the configuration/documentation.
• Investigate present secrets management/lifecycle and the current state of your Kubernetes definitions.
• Storage of infrastructure logic on Git version control
• Build a prioritised backlog for improvements.
  
  

Step 2: Design a GitOps approach that works for you

This is where the change begins. It includes a multifunctional team of engineers to implement the designed solutions, integrations, and architectures together with your team.

• Design a GitOps solution based on your needs and iterate to implement state-of-the-art solutions.
• Define a branching strategy for seamless developer workflow, separation of duties, and protection of production-level code.
• Define the tools to be used to power your solution.
• Develop a customised MVP that fits your architecture for optimal performance and results.

Step  3: Implementation of the pipeline We implement the designed solutions, integrations, and architecture together with your team

• CI/CD pipeline, ready to build, test, and apps to a cluster-builds.
• Tests are triggered automatically by commits landing in the main branch of the app's source-code repository.
• Deployments to GKE clusters are triggered by commits in the app's deploy repository (GitOps) and executed by ArgoCD.
• Knowledge sharing: Practical walk-through session to demo the sample microservice pipeline, documentation, and instructions to configure new pipelines for other apps
• Provide a single source of truth on the state of the environment.
• Create a monitoring system, a GitOps controller (e.g. ArgoCD), and a defined matrix of metrics to track your environment (e.g. Prometheus ).
• Enforce access management policies via Pull Requests.
• Initiate a secrets management process for protecting production-level secrets and credentials.
• Implement code control versioning tools, cloud providers, and DevOps tools based on the defined strategy.

Phase 4: Completion and handover

We implement the designed solutions, integrations, and architecture together with your team.

• Full overview of solution and demo..
• Documentation
• Complete knowledge transfer and handover.
• Delivery review: What did we achieve together?
• Discuss further improvements.