Make Your Path to Production Secure & Predictable With Weave GitOps Pipelines

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Pipelines are a crucial component when building consistent and secure software delivery. A pipeline enables you to set your application's path to production - from development and testing to production, phases an application will touch on its way there. Weave GitOps Enterprise has recently released a Pipelines feature that enables you to easily define and quickly scale the creation and management of GitOps pipelines.

CI/CD helps you deliver cloud-native applications at a rapid pace by enabling a frictionless workflow through the development and deployment phases. For streamlining this workflow, CI/CD depends on pipelines and so does GitOps by extension. In fact, pipelines are considered one of the three pillars of the GitOps framework, along with observability and version control. Pipelines sit in the center of GitOps operations enabling you to deliver applications safely with visibility and predictability. However, pipelines come with a few challenges, such as implementation hassles, security vulnerabilities, and low reproducibility.

With multiple teams involved across the SDLC, it can lead to a lack of consistency in pipeline creation. Pipelines span different environments and setting up a pipeline will get as complicated as your system. Ad hoc, manual processes are used to create pipelines and the back and forth between multiple teams results in delayed releases. Security is an afterthought, and even if considered, every team has different security protocols, leaving many security loopholes across pipelines. Since the process is manual, it is hard to reproduce, and results in new errors and issues every time a new pipeline is created. These are just some of the challenges that Weave GitOps Enterprise Pipelines was designed to address.

Weave GitOps ‘Pipelines’

Weave GitOps Enterprise is a GitOps Automation platform that facilitates fully automated delivery so that you can seamlessly implement code changes through staging and production with predictability and visibility.

Figure: Weave GitOps Pipelines

It gives you deeper visibility into every deployment on a single screen showing information like the application version and runtime environment. This enables you to push code to production with confidence. Further, it gives platform operators control to define the specific Helm charts they want to allow as part of an environment. Besides visibility, Pipelines also allows you to transfer data between objects and set alerts in multiple clusters.

Weave GitOps Pipelines is built to be flexible and can be integrated with your existing CI setup, including Jenkins or GitHub Action.

Benefits of Weave GitOps Pipelines:

• Automate code rollouts between environments without requiring the Ops team’s manual intervention.
• Enhance visibility to keep control of how the code is rolled out through different environments.
• Give developers the independence of choosing a specific toolkit to deploy applications at their own pace.
• Automate rollback of changes in case of failures by implementing automated gates.

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