GitOps goes mainstream at KubeCon Barcelona

On the day of our panel at KubeCon, @Laura Tacho & I discovered the room had been changed - only on entering the room did we realise it had been upgraded. If I had bothered to check beforehand, I would have seen that >1600 folks had marked the session as one they planned to attend.

The natural response to a huge room of people is of course, to take a selfie or two - you know, just to show your mum after the fact.

The panel itself went well (despite one of our members showing up late) and lots of interesting gems emerged. I loved Laura’s take on GitOps providing psychological safety and preventing heroism. I spoke about Jenkins X as one of the tools that comes with GitOps baked in. Also it was really interesting to hear questions from audience which included questions about how to go about introducing GitOps to their organizations.

Still I am blown away by the ~2K people attending a panel (I admit I am not usually a fan of panels), so I have to conclude that there is a huge need out there for people to figure out the best way to do CI/CD in a cloud native world and also hear real world stories of what is working for others that they can emulate.

You can see the panel in full glory here: https://youtu.be/uvbaxC1Dexc

Maybe you are thinking well maybe the room was full because of the panelists: Alexis Richardson is former CNCF Technical Oversight Committee chair, Laura herself is well known in both CNCF & Docker communities and Ivan & myself are no light-weights either. Or maybe you might think I was going to ask Alexis about his thoughts on the CD.Foundation and everybody showed up just in case there were fireworks. But I think people really showed up because of the genuine need to know more about GitOps. For evidence, I'll point you at the other GitOps session on the program: a talk from Allison Richardet & Fabio Giannetti of controllercard on their GitOps Journey . This was a real world talk on the challenges controllercard faced embracing the GitOps philosophy and it was so popular that people were sitting on the floor so they could attend.

Ops track is packed with @ARichardet and Fabio Giannetti talking about snowflake clusters. pic.twitter.com/TvOu2nUHxH

— Jorge Castro (@castrojo) May 21, 2019

So what does it all mean?

Love it or hate it, the GitOps term is a sticky term - it resonates with people and has become one way people can start to get their head around what best practices for cloud native CI/CD should look like. GitOps is more than infrastructure-as-code and makes a big difference in the Kubernetes world. Jenkins X comes with GitOps baked in, such as for promotion from preview to staging environments, or even for managing Jenkins X itself. Regardless of what tools you use, GitOps has essential techniques and practices to help you go faster without costing you stability, and will make all the difference in your cloud native journey.