Implementing GitOps with Argo CD, GitHub, and Azure Kubernetes Service

Many organizations have already shifted to DevOps as part of their digital transformation strategy. This promotes an environment where collaboration and shared responsibility foster a more cross-functional setting, necessitating processes that enable developers to perform more IT operations-related tasks. In this article, I will explain what GitOps is and demonstrate its application using ArgoCD, GitHub, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

What’s GitOps?

GitOps is a developer-centric framework for operational practices that is declarative and based on the version control system Git, a term coined by Weaveworks in 2017. It facilitates the automation of infrastructure provisioning and software deployment. Developers store infrastructure as code (IaC) files, configuration files, and application codes in Git repositories, which represent the desired state of their infrastructure. When a commit is pushed to a monitored branch in the source control, it triggers an update that aligns the cloud infrastructure or application to match the new state.

How GitOps works?

The GitOps workflow involves the following steps:

1. The developer begins a new task by creating a branch from the main production branch.
2. The developer writes configuration files that define the infrastructure and resources needed.
3. Once the development is completed, a pull request (PR) is created for team review and approval.
4. Upon approval, the code is merged into the production branch, which the GitOps tool monitors. The tool detects discrepancies between the current deployed state and the repository state, raising an alert for manual synchronization or automatically updating the infrastructure.

There are many tools available for adopting GitOps, such as Azure DevOps Pipelines, GitHub Actions, and CircleCI. Some tools, like Azure DevOps, CircleCI, and Jenkins, have a broader scope, while others are more Kubernetes-centric. For this demonstration, I will be using ArgoCD.

What’s Argo CD?

ArgoCD is an open-source GitOps tool that is installed within a Kubernetes cluster. It…