GitOps Cookbook

Chapter 8. Advanced Topics

In the previous chapter, you had an overview of implementing GitOps workflows using Argo CD recipes. Argo CD is a famous and influential open source project that helps with both simple use cases and more advanced ones. In this chapter, we will discuss topics needed when you move forward in your GitOps journey, and you need to manage security, automation, and advanced deployment models for multicluster scenarios.

Security is a critical aspect of automation and DevOps. DevSecOps is a new definition of an approach where security is a shared responsibility throughout the entire IT lifecycle. Furthermore, the DevSecOps Manifesto specifies security as code to operate and contribute value with less friction. And this goes in the same direction as GitOps principles, where everything is declarative.

On the other hand, this also poses the question of avoiding storing unencrypted plain-text credentials in Git. As stated in the book Path to GitOps by Christian Hernandez, Argo CD luckily currently provides two patterns to manage security in GitOps workflows:

• Storing encrypted secrets in Git, such as with a Sealed Secret (see Recipe 8.1)

• Storing secrets in external services or vaults, then storing only the reference to such secrets in Git (see Recipe 8.2)

The chapter then moves to advanced deployment techniques, showing how to manage webhooks with Argo CD (see Recipe 8.3) and with ApplicationSets (see Recipe 8.4). ApplicationSets is a component of Argo CD that ...