GitOps for Configuration Drift Management In Kubernetes Environments

Abstract

Modern software development and deployment is intricately intertwined with the paradigm shift towards containerization, orchestration, and cloud computing. The management of containerized applications in dynamic and distributed environments becomes both a critical necessity and a formidable challenge as organizations increasingly migrate towards microservices architectures.Within this the phenomenon of configuration drift stands out as a pervasive issue. Wherein the actual state of deployed applications diverges unintentionally from the intended state. Thus leading to operational inefficiencies that may impact security and incur compromised system reliability. GitOps emerges as a novel approach to handle this issue. Utilizing the principle of “single source of truth”, a principle which posits that all parts of the infrastructure should be organized from a single reference point. Which amounts to a Git repository in this instance. This research sat out to explore GitOps for configuration management within the context of a cloud provider utilizing Kubernetes and Prometheus. With a specific focus on detection, and remedy of issues posed by configuration drift in containerized applications. Our conclusion were that GitOps presents notable advantages in deployment of configuration changes and remedy of configuration drift. With nearly a 50% reduction in speed to deploy and remedy configuration drift when dealing with misconfigured changes and application dependency updates