Foreword
A few years ago, during a trip to Milan for a Red Hat event, I ran into a passionate colleague at the Red Hat office. We spoke at length about how customers in Italy adopt containers to speed up application development on OpenShift. While his name slipped my mind at the time, his enthusiasm about the subject didn’t, especially since he was also hospitable enough to take me to an espresso bar near the office to show me what real coffee tastes like. A while later, I was introduced to a developer advocate in a meeting who would speak at a conference about CI/CD using products like OpenShift Pipelines and OpenShift GitOps that my teams delivered at the time. At that moment, I instantly recognized Natale. Many who attended that talk thought it was insightful, given his firsthand grasp of challenges that customers experience when delivering applications and his hands-on approach to technology.
Application delivery is a complex process involving many systems and teams with numerous handoffs between these parties, often synonymous with delays and back-and-forth talks at each point. Automation has long been a key enabler for improving this process and has become particularly popular within the DevOps movement. Continuous integration, infrastructure as code, and numerous other practices became common in many organizations as they navigated their journey toward adopting DevOps.
More recently, and coinciding with the increased adoption of Kubernetes, GitOps as a blueprint for implementing a subset of DevOps practices has become an area I frequently get asked about. While neither the term nor the practices GitOps advocates are new, it does combine. It presents the existing knowledge in a workflow that is simple, easy to understand, and can be implemented in a standard way across many teams.
Although the path to adopting the GitOps workflow is simple and concrete, many technical choices need to be made to fit within each organization’s security, compliance, operational, and other requirements. Therefore, I am particularly thrilled about the existence of this book and the practical guides it provides to assist these teams in making choices that are right for their applications, teams, and organizations.