Conway's Law and GitOps

Pulled directly from the introduction of DevOps’ish 272 Conway’s Law and GitOps are two things that go hand in hand. I’d like that not to be the case, but in building and working with an upcoming demo of multi-cluster GitOps, I’m worried GitOps might not reach an escape velocity over Conway’s Law. Conway’s Law states, “Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.” This might seem natural but think about the different ways we communicate now. E-mail, text messages, phone calls, Slack, Discord, Twitter, etc. are all communication tools that serve various purposes. But, in GitOps, whether you design around a good developer experience (using git as the only interface) or design around a minimalistic amount of tooling (one secret management solution), that tooling has to fit within Conway’s Law usually. ...

June 20, 2022 · Chris Short

GitOpsCon EU 2022

All GitOpsCon EU 2022 videos are available in a YouTube playlist for viewing at your leisure. This page contains the parts Chris Short took part in. GitOps As a Journey - Dan Garfield, Codefresh; Scott Rigby, Weaveworks & Chris Short, AWS The term “GitOps” goes back to Alexis Richardson’s initial blog post on operations by pull request but over time it became clear that GitOps was poorly understood. At the end of 2020, Amazon, Azure, Codefresh, Github, Redhat, and Weaveworks came together to start the GitOps Working Group. The goal was to work together and invite the community to collaborate on clear principles and definitions around GitOps. In this talk, two Open GitOps Co-Chairs will share how the principles were created, what they mean, and some common misunderstanding about what is and isn’t GitOps. ...

May 17, 2022 · Chris Short
Open GitOps logo

GitOps: An implementation of DevOps

This post does not reflect the views of OpenGitOps or the GitOps Working Group. These are my opinions from years of experience in DevOps and in working with GitOps. I realized the other day; I talk a lot about GitOps in my newsletter, DevOps’ish. But I haven’t written much at all about it here or anywhere else. There’s a reason for that. But now is time to put some words on this site about GitOps and how I view it in relation to DevOps. ...

December 6, 2021 · Chris Short

2020 Learnings, 2021 Expectations

We’ve all had challenging years before. However, none were quite as challenging as in 2020. In the conclusion of last year’s post, I wrote, “I am hopeful that whatever economic upheaval we face as a society in 2020 is limited.” At that time, economic indicators were bubble-ish. However, a global pandemic was not something I had in the cards. No one did. A global pandemic, international protests against horrific injustices, and a US government damn near inept at helping with any of it. These events led to the largest voter turnout in this nation’s history. Hopefully, this will change our path and put the country back on track. ...

December 30, 2020 · Chris Short

2019 Learnings, 2020 Expectations

A former co-worker and now friend has a tagline, “Every day is a school day.” I remind myself of this fact almost every time I learn something new. 2019 was the hardest year of my life. I’d like to share some things I picked up on this most recent journey around the sun we call 2019. I’ll make some predictions about 2020 in the process too. Kubernetes Last year, I said I thought Kubernetes would get easier. That didn’t happen. It’s not any easier to use Kubernetes. But, to be honest, I’m not sure if Kubernetes itself will ever get easier, it’ll be us getting more used to using it and building tools around it. I still think vendors need to focus on ease of use if they want to see their products getting adopted. But, the project in general, might not need to worry about ease of use. This seems like hair splitting, sure, but, it seems like Kubernetes did manage to penetrate every sector of tech in 2019. This is going to lend itself to a big ole ecosystem of people and orgs working on ease of use on behalf of the community. ...

January 1, 2020 · Chris Short