With the rising popularity of implementing GitOps patterns into the DevOps Lifecycle, it get's more important to secure your production deployments. With the combination of Flux V2 for automated GitOps rollouts and flagger, we can take care of safe and reliable production deployments. Flagger enables us to do automated Blue/Green and Canary deployments and automatically roll back to the previous version, in case the quality gates will fail. In this talk we will show the different deployment strategies that flagger offers and will show how an fully automated delivery can look like.

1. GitOps with Flux and
Flagger
15.07.2021

2. Sebastian Tiggelkamp
DevOps Engineer
St. Cajetan-Straße 43
D-81669 Munich, Germany
Phone: +49-89-45841-100
sebastian.tiggelkamp@consol.de
www.consol.com
Twitter: @consol_de

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4. GitOps with Flux and Flagger Slide 4
Agenda
• Introduction
• GitOps

Workflow

Advantages & Challenges
• Flagger

Canary

Blue/Green Deployment
• Demo
• App deployment Flux & Flagger

5. GitOps with Flux and Flagger Slide 5
Introduction
GitOps
Using Git as the single source of truth to sync the desired state (stored in Git) with the current
deployed state (e.g. application running on Kubernetes) automatically
„GitOps is like DevOps powered by Git“
„GitOps is a way of implementing Continuous Deployment for cloud native applications“
„GitOps is the concept that deployments should be as easy as an engineer enacting a code
change“

6. GitOps with Flux and Flagger Slide 6
GitOps
Workflow

7. GitOps with Flux and Flagger Slide 7
GitOps
Advantages

Traceability

All changes to the system are traceable and relate to a Git action (e.g. commit, PR)

Prevent manual interactions

GitOps Operator can automatically revert manual changes to the system

Rollback

The state of a target system can be rolled back by e.g. revert a Git commit

Independency

Any CI engine can be used to build & test your deployment before the GitOps process will
take over

8. GitOps with Flux and Flagger Slide 8
GitOps
Challenges

Complexity

Depending on the scope, changing from a traditional deployment process to a GitOps
process can take some time

Debugging

It can be hard to locate errors in YAML manifests, especially if the number of manifests is
growing

Conflicts

If the CI-Engine changes manifests, parallel write-operations need to be prevented

Secrets

All system relevant information are stored in Git

Sensitive information like secrets need to be secured properly

9. GitOps with Flux and Flagger Slide 9
Flagger
Introduction

Automates the release process for applications running on k8s

Integrates several deployment strategies

Canary release

Blue/Green Deployment

A/B Testing

Deployment progression is based on metrics that are queried

Prometheus

Datadog

New Relic

Cloudwatch

Graphite

10. GitOps with Flux and Flagger Slide 10
Flagger
Alerting / Notification

Flagger can alert the user via

Slack

MS Teams

Discord

Rocket

11. GitOps with Flux and Flagger Slide 11
Flagger
Metrics

Builtin metrics

HTTP request success rate & duration

Custom metrics using MetricTemplates

External metric provider

Prometheus

Datadog

New Relic

Cloudwatch

Graphite

12. GitOps with Flux and Flagger Slide 12
Flagger
Canary Deployment

13. GitOps with Flux and Flagger Slide 13
Flagger
Blue/Green Deployment

14. Demo

15. Thank you!
Q&A

16. ConSol
Consulting & Solutions Software
GmbH
St.-Cajetan-Straße 43
D-81669 Munich
Germany
Tel.: +49-89-45841-100
info@consol.de
www.consol.com
Twitter: @consol_de