I often hear folks use terminology like “push GitOps”. But as far as I understand things, it’s only GitOps if you’re following the four principles described in TFA. Otherwise it’s just sparkling pipelines.
Not quite. You hear gatekeeping from some ill-advised people who either are deeply invested in pushing specific tools or a type of approach, or fool themselves into believing they know the one true way.
Meanwhile, people who do push-based GitOps just get stuff done by configuring the pipelines to do very simple and straigh-forward stuff: package and deliver deployment units, update references to which deployment units must be deployed, and actually deploy them.
The ugly truth is that push-based GitOps is terribly simple to pull off, and doesn't require any fancy tools or software or kubernetes operators. Configuration drift and automatic reconciliation, supposedly the biggest selling point of pull-based gitops, is a non-issue because deployment pipelines are idempotent. You can even run them as cron jobs, if you'd like to. But maintaining trivial, single-stage pipelines does not make a impressive CV.
> Otherwise it’s just sparkling pipelines.
Yeah, simple systems. God forbid something is reliable, easy to maintain, robust, and straight-forward. We need full blown kubernetes operators running on timers instead, isn't it? Like digging moats around their job stability. It's madness.
That can take hours, and that’s not acceptable when PROD is burning.
That’s why most places don’t dare syncing to prod automatically.
Nonsense. Your process is only as complex as you want it to be. Virtually all git providers allow you to revert commits from their GUI, and you can configure pipelines to allow specific operations to not require PRs.
As a reference, in push-based GitOps it's pretty mundane to configure your pipelines to automatically commit to other git repos without requiring PRs. This is the most basic aspect of this whole approach. I mean, think about it: if your goal is to automate a process then why would you go through great lengths to prevent yourself from automating it?