Managing a host of third-party tools from your code base rather than their native dashboards yields a ton of benefits. Welcome to the world of GitOps.
Developing technology is far more expansive than just writing code. Technology teams need to consider a number of different aspects of the company’s technology stack, including its compute infrastructure, storage, development pipeline, security, and more.
Companies often purchase various third-party products to complete their technology stack so they don’t have to build it all on their own. Each of these tools comes with some form of management console or dashboard that enables companies to tailor that specific tool to the their own needs as well as integrate it within their product. The onboarding, configuration, and ongoing management will likely occur directly from within that console. In fact, managing these third-party products and dashboards actually becomes a significant portion of a technology team’s workload and today often falls under the responsibility of the DevOps team.
To increase automation and efficiency, some companies now are bypassing dashboards and instead preferring to manage these products directly from within their code base. These products are then deployed and configured not as another management console, but rather by developers, as code, in the company’s Git (GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket). This trend has been coined “GitOps” or “Git Centric”, as increasingly products are being codified and deployed within Git environments.
