Community post by Daniel Holbach
The team around GitOps Days mission is to educate the world about the leaps that GitOps has made as a methodology and tool chain. A secondary objective of the group is to create a community for GitOps maintainers, engineers, practitioners and users.
One of the speakers at this year’s event was Winnie Gakuru, DevSecOps Engineer II at Safaricom PLC. Safaricom is the leading provider of converged communication solutions in Kenya. In addition to providing a broad range of first-class products and services for Telephony, Broadband Internet and Financial services, Safaricom seeks to uplift the welfare of Kenyans through value-added services and support for community projects.
Safaricom has been around for 20 years and along the way decided to become a full tech company with services like the very popular phone payment service M-Pesa. We love that they are modernizing fully with Cloud Native.
Winnie explains the term GitOps and how it is implemented at Safaricom and which tooling is involved. Winnie’s team was originally DevOps, but the importance of security led to them becoming DevSecOps. They work with the broader DevOps teams to hear their needs and train their teammates accordingly and make sure that all these solutions are secure.
Another highlight is the need for multi-tenancy because vendors need to be able to manage their own environments. Flux is essential to their cloud native journey and it provides two (among other) non-negotiable requirements: security and multi-tenancy.
What was particularly interesting to hear was the team’s focus on end-to-end-automation: enforce cluster policies, a simple rollback option, full accountability and simple processes.
There were challenges along the way, as there are many concepts involved in understanding the depth of GitOps, but on the whole was “believed by seeing.” After implementation, the number of deployments increased dramatically and the number of incidents went down. The automation and increased velocity for building and testing is a defining factor in keeping the services competitive.
Here’s the video in its entirety if you’d like to watch from start to finish:
Next Steps
Check out the Safricom website, and to learn more about Flux, visit fluxcd.io, checkout the Flux docs or GitHub, and feel free to reach out on the CNCF Slack #flux channel (get an invite here).
Did you miss the GitOps Days conference? No worries, you can watch all sessions on-demand at the GitOps Days 2022 Playlist.