Tips from the Trenches: GitOps at Adobe - Larisa Andreea Danaila & Ionut

The presentation discusses the challenges of having separate workflows for infrastructure provisioning and application deployment and proposes a unified approach using Crossplane. The speaker also highlights the importance of putting everything in a single release.

• Separate workflows for infrastructure provisioning and application deployment lead to inefficiency, higher risk of errors, longer feedback loop, and unmanageable complexity
• A unified approach using Crossplane can increase iteration speed, quality, and time to market
• Putting everything in a single release is crucial for continuous deployment pipeline and reducing cognitive load on developers
• Examples of challenges include running post-deployment tests, making changes in configuration, and dealing with multiple repositories

The speaker mentions the struggle of migrating from Spinnaker, which had an out-of-the-box solution for the separate workflows issue. Another company, Sneak, also faced the same issue and mentioned the cognitive load it had on their developers who had to deal with multiple repositories.

At Adobe, Larisa and Ionut have spent a big part of 2022 investing in GitOps, learning how to model a deployment system which encompasses stringent organisational CI/CD standards. They onboarded new concepts, rethought deployment automation flows and got creative in the process, when community resources proved insufficient. They migrated off of Spinnaker and rebuilt deployment pipelines from scratch using the Argo projects. In the process, they had to tackle challenges such as promotion of code across environments, automated rollbacks or deployment validation through functional tests. Over time, they refactored these deployment pipelines to serve an increasing number of applications, adding new patterns to accommodate web, streaming and batch services alike. New practices have emerged from this experience, tackling challenges such as: * testing infrastructure changes; * eliminating duplication of manifests; * auditing; * getting visibility into deployments. This journey has left Larisa and Ionut feeling like they're getting GitOps right and that these patterns and practices are ready for company-wide adoption. Join them to hear how they overcame the concerns of moving to a GitOps paradigm and adopted Argo at Adobe.