cdCon+GitOpsCon 2023

Born out of the concern that there was a fatal level of dysfunction on the operations side of the tech industry, DevOps ushered in an era of delivering applications and services at high velocity. That high velocity left resources and knowledge scattered across a company in manually-configured infrastructure, ticket comments, and the brains of engineers. An application’s configuration could end up adrift of what it was supposed to be, causing issues and downtime. GitOps solves this issue with a simple assertion: write it down. GitOps-related projects have become some of the highest velocity projects in CNCF with broad adoption. At The New York Times, the CICD team approached CI with a GitOps mindset, allowing us to deploy with velocity at scale, while also safeguarding governance and standardization across the organization, preventing configuration drift by leveraging GitOps and declarative configuration, and governed by CI testing and CD enforcement. In this talk we will discuss our utilization of OPA, GitOps establishment, and Scaled/Distributed ArgoCD in a multi-tenant/cluster cloud. Myths busted along the way, and how we went from screwing around to writing it down.