️🚀 🚀 Top 3 GitOps Tools for Infrastructure Automation in 2024 🔨

#opensource #devops #cloud #productivity

In 2024, developers should primarily focus on their core tasks of feature development, fixing bugs and making improvements to the application.

That means less time spent on adding feature flags, managing infrastructure, monitoring deployments, etc.
Also, as per Puppet State of DevOps Report 2023, lack of automation has been one of the biggest pain points of platform teams.

So in this article, let’s unpack why your project needs infrastructure automation and share tools to help you get started.

Shall we?

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How Can Your Project Benefit From Infrastructure Automation?
Tool #1: Digger
Tool #2: Argo Project
Tool #3: Pulumi
Wrap Up

How Can Your Project Benefit From Infrastructure Automation?

Let’s go over some of the basic benefits of automating your infrastructure:

Ensure repeatable results every time. So that you can provide predictable and reliable experience to users and development teams.
Remove the need for (#clickops), engineers clicking around in a cloud provider UI. Automation improves process efficiency and agility by reducing manual effort. As a result, freeing up DevOps engineers from the tedious tasks.
Built in auditing. Keep a log of every operation done in your infrastructure. Comprehensive audit trails provide visibility into history of operations which is of great help at the time of debugging and troubleshooting.

Tool #1: Digger

If you want to simplify your infrastructure management and improve visibility and auditability of its changes, Digger might be worth exploring. It’s an open-source IaC automation and collaboration software for Terraform and OpenTofu.

Digger tool showing proposed infrastructure changes.

You can version control your infrastructure through defining it in code and storing it in the git repository. With automated infra provisioning and updates, Digger ensures consistency and significantly reduces manual effort of DevOps teams.

At the time of writing this article, Digger has ~2.5k stars on GitHub and is used by companies like Grab, McKinsey & Company, Duolingo with several others.

They also have a highly responsive community that will help you with roadblocks along the way.

Tool #2: Argo Project

Argo Project has become one of the top projects to manage Kubernetes clusters and workflows. Along with being able to run CI/CD pipelines natively, you can easily run compute intensive jobs like data processing in fraction of time.

With it’s rollouts tool, it provides advanced deployment capabilities such as:

Blue-green ✅
Canary ✅
Canary analysis ✅
Experimentation ✅

Also, Argo provides a declarative approach to application deployment that simplifies the deployment process and reduces the risk of errors.

Argo tool — Argo Tool to get more done with Kubernetes.

If you’re thinking, can Argo meet your advanced deployment requirements? Here’s a step-by-step tutorial by @pavanbelagatti on how to implement advanced deployment strategies:

Argo Rollouts: Unleashing Advanced Deployment Strategies

Pavan Belagatti ・ Aug 2 '23

#kubernetes #tutorial #devops #learning

Tool #3: Pulumi

Storing infrastructure as code is great but how to write code for one? Well Pulumi has solved that for you. It simplifies and automates your cloud infrastructure and optimizes for speed of releases.

Best part? You can do that in your familiar programming language with autocomplete, type checking and up-to-date documentation. Leaving no reason to procrastinate 😅

Here’s what Matt Stephenson, Senior Principal Software Engineer at Starburst Analytics has to say about Pulumi:

Pulumi let us build and automate cloud infrastructure projects at a scale that simply wasn’t imaginable using prior-generation infrastructure as code technologies

Pulumi is truly your partner for scaling cloud infrastructure.