What is Nullstone GitOps?
Nullstone GitOps is a platform-agnostic GitOps implementation delivered as a SaaS tool.
Before diving deeper into Nullstone GitOps, it may be helpful to understand GitOps. Here is a key snippet taken from the official site describing GitOps.
The core idea of GitOps is having a Git repository that always contains declarative descriptions of the infrastructure currently desired in the production environment and an automated process to make the production environment match the described state in the repository.
Why use Nullstone GitOps?
Currently, the most popular GitOps tools are ArgoCD and FluxCD. These tools are great tools, but they are built for infrastructure engineers using Kubernetes. Instead, Nullstone GitOps was built for developers to configure continuous deployment for application architectures.
- Nullstone provides safe, automated tooling for injecting secrets in your applications.
- Nullstone GitOps provides powerful and flexible workflows for DEV to PROD Propagation.
- Nullstone GitOps is platform-agnostic and supports non-Kubernetes platforms.
- Nullstone tracks the entire deployment lifecycle in a single activity: provision/update infra, build, push, deploy, and monitor deployment.
- Built-in support for environment-specific configurations. (e.g. per-branch deployments, optional auto-apply)
- Out-of-the-box support for ephemeral/preview environments.
- Automated build/deploy can be configured per application and per environment.
- The IaC files and engine are platform-agnostic. Kubernetes is supported, but not required.
- A developer configures an application architecture rather than granular cloud resources.
TIP
Nullstone GitOps can be used in conjunction with ArgoCD/FluxCD. Typically, an infra team manages base/shared infrastructure with ArgoCD/FluxCD. Developers use Nullstone GitOps for the application layer.
How does it work?
Nullstone operates by listening to webhooks from the Git repository. These webhooks trigger Nullstone GitOps pipelines for each environment that matches the Git branch for the webhook event. For each app, the Nullstone pipeline orchestrates a CD pipeline of build, push, deploy, update infra, and monitor. The CD pipeline can be configured to run each step using Nullstone or via external tools.
During the infra update step, Nullstone merges the configuration from the Nullstone UI, .nullstone/config.yml
, and .nullstone/<overrides>.yml
. The final configuration is used to apply infra updates using Terraform or Kubernetes manifests (coming soon).