The history of software development could be written as constant acceleration. From the steady waterfall model of releasing new versions once a year, to agile making small features weekly, to modern cloud architecture pushing out code changes as often as you or I might take a coffee break.

How have we achieved this acceleration? Through the evolution of tools that make code deployment safer, easier and more observable.

GitOps is not a revolution, but rather a system to support more frequent releases that drive modern software development. It’s a standardized workflow for deploying, configuring, monitoring, updating and managing infrastructure as code. Most importantly, GitOps enables you to move faster safely.

‘Move Fast and Break Things’ Has its Limits

In the heady days of agile’s first introduction, speed was everything. Release every week, and who cares if you introduce bugs? Users would find them, you’d fix them and the evolving product would look more and more like the ideal product for users every day.

These ideals work when building a digital marketing agency or a goofy storefront that sells pencil toppers. But “who cares about a few bugs” doesn’t fly when you’re running an online bank concerned with compliance. Further, it’s one thing to introduce bugs by changing the product in ways that users don’t love. It’s quite another to break production and take the site down.

As we’ve encouraged developers to embrace DevOps and empower small teams to release microservices, it’s easier than ever to experiment with operations and make changes that break things.

The answer might seem like “slow down and be more careful,” but the actual answer is even more speed.

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