Summary
The subject of GitOps can fill entire books. As rockstar SREs, we learned to leverage pipeline automation to meet our goals. We can reduce toil by automating not only deployments but also security and compliance scanning, testing, opening change requests, and providing developers with feedback, enabling them to iterate faster.
The true value of the pipeline is testing. We talk about making SRE proactive instead of reactive all the time, looking for ways in which we can prevent downtime – instead of responding to an issue at 2 a.m. – working to end the expense of half a dozen or more people on an outage call, which steals time away from development. Testing is the one proactive tool that absolutely works.
In addition, we walked through a GitHub Actions pipeline to illustrate just how simple it is to add additional steps and hopefully brought you some real understanding of pipelines.
Next up, we’ll discuss serverless deployment, containers, and Kubernetes...