Why Git is essencial for DevOps
Many organizations now see DevOps as part of their digital transformation strategy, since it encourages a culture of shared responsibility, transparency, and faster feedback. Yet as the gap between development and operations teams shrinks, so do the processes.
So it goes with Git, the most widely used version control system in the world today. As companies embrace DevOps methodologies, so to the tools, which has created an evolution to GitOps, a set of practices that allow developers to perform more IT operations-related tasks.
The StackOverflow Developer survey results shown that over 90% of respondents use Git, suggesting that it is a fundamental tool to being a developer.
Let’s look at the key factors on why Git is needed for DevOps.
1. To Have Meaningful CI/CD Discussions with Developers
One of the tasks of a DevOps engineer is to design and develop CI/CD pipelines. Git plays a key role in CI/CD. Sometimes, you need to sit with the developers and discuss the right approach for git branching in the CI/CD pipeline. This includes git tagging, release versioning, etc. In fact, in most organizations, DevOps engineers own and operate the git repositories.
So, to have a meaningful discussion with development teams, you should have good knowledge of Git.
2. For Infrastructure as Code
Also, when we talk about infrastructure as code, we develop and maintain all the infrastructure code in Git. Be it a Jenkins pipeline, Ansible playbook, or a Terraform module.
We treat infra code the same way application code is treated. Meaning, infra code goes through the same unit testing and integration tests before getting deployed to any environment. It means, even the infrastructure code needs to have a CI/CD pipeline. That again translates to git-based workflows.
Most companies do not follow test-driven development for infra code, but it is the standard way of developing infrastructure code.
3. Gitops
With technical practices like GitOps, git acts as a source of truth for all the infrastructure configurations.
With Gitops, any change in git repo configs gets deployed in the infrastructure. So it is a must for DevOps engineers to know all about git.
A few myths about Git
Myth 1: Git is only for Software Developers
Git is not just for developers. Git is for anyone working in IT - from Systems Administrators to Solutions Architects, Software Engineers, Team Leads, Project managers - should equally learn and understand the workflows in Git.
With the advent of Infrastructure as Code, system administrators and operations teams will be using Git to store code related to infrastructure such as Terraform Configuration files, Ansible Playbooks, Vagrant files, supporting shell scripts.
Myth 2: Git is GitHub
Due to the usage of Git and GitHub as the complete set that forms the version control toolkit, adopters of the two tools misconceive Git and GitHub as interchangeable tools. Git is a tool that offers the ability to track changes on files that constitute a project. Git offers the utility that is used to monitor changes and persists the changes.
On the other hand, GitHub is akin to a website hosting service. The difference here is that with GitHub, the hosted content is a repository. The repository can then be accessed from this central point and the codebase shared.
Git is used to tracking changes in the source code, enabling multiple developers to work together on non-linear development. Also this tecnology provide scalability, distributed development, backups and more benefits to the software development. If your organization needs DevOps with wide experience working with Git for your projects, contact us by clicking on the button below to hire our services.
