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# Practical tips and tricks for CI/CD success

Stop relying on fragile manual scripts. Configuration drift ruins deployments. Discover actionable GitOps tips to orchestrate robust, scalable CI/CD workflows using Keptn.

- **Speakers:** [Zan Markan](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/@zan-markan)
- **Event:** WeAreDevelopers LIVE
- **Published:** April 6, 2022
- **Duration:** 50:28
- **URL:** https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/370-practical-tips-and-tricks-for-ci-cd-success

## Summary

At its core, the journey to mature CI/CD and infrastructure management requires shifting from fragile, imperative commands to robust, declarative configurations. Relying on manual scripts or CLI executions often leads to configuration drift, compromised security, and a lack of version control. By adopting GitOps principles, engineering teams can manage infrastructure through modern software development practices, using version control as the single source of truth to ensure automated and continuously reconciled application states.

A successful GitOps strategy relies on four core principles defined by the CNCF: systems must have their desired state expressed declaratively, stored in a way that enforces immutability, pulled automatically by a controller, and continuously reconciled against the current state. A significant advantage of this approach is that infrastructure changes are heavily vetted through pull requests, enabling automated testing and peer review before any modifications reach production environments.

Integrating these practices into a control plane like Keptn—a cloud-native project for application lifecycle orchestration—allows teams to manage deployments, testing, and remediation entirely via custom resource definitions. Instead of manually configuring workflows, operators define a service, its deployment stages, and SLO-based quality gates purely as code. Unlike continuous deployment agents such as Argo CD or Flux, Keptn sits a layer above, orchestrating these tools to standardize the deployment pipeline across multiple services. This unified workflow drastically reduces onboarding time, offering scalable, resilient, and highly verifiable cloud-native application delivery.

**Keywords:** gitops principles, declarative infrastructure configuration, continuous reconciliation, configuration drift prevention, infrastructure single source of truth, kubernetes custom resource definitions, keptn control plane, application lifecycle orchestration, cloud-native tools, service level objective quality gates, pull-based continuous deployment, continuous delivery pipelines, service level indicators, infrastructure pull requests, automated application remediation

## Chapters

1. **Assessing limitations of manual imperative infrastructure operations** (00:12) — How managing clusters through manual command-line operations introduces fragility and maintenance bottlenecks.
1. **Adopting declarative software configuration for managing infrastructure** (08:29) — How declaring desired application states simplifies administration logic and enables effective version control.
1. **Identifying the drawbacks of local cluster configuration management** (10:44) — Why applying infrastructure changes directly from local developer machines introduces severe security and consistency risks.
1. **Establishing automated Git workflows as a stable single source** (12:49) — Using pull requests to ensure infrastructure code is thoroughly documented, reviewed, and tested before application.
1. **Core principles and prerequisites of GitOps implementations** (15:15) — Exploring the core principles defined by the CNCF for continuous, reliable infrastructure management methodologies.
1. **Understanding continuous reconciliation loops in Kubernetes operator patterns** (19:37) — How operator patterns programmatically compare requested configurations against live operating environments to continuously resolve drift.
1. **Designing continuous delivery workflows with GitOps state synchronization** (22:17) — Connecting continuous integration pipelines to state repositories to create a robust and automated workflow synchronization loop.
1. **Orchestrating complex application lifecycles using the Keptn control plane** (26:21) — Utilizing advanced control planes to manage automated delivery pipelines based on service level criteria.
1. **Enabling GitOps using custom resource definitions and Kubernetes operators** (31:06) — Extending configuration platforms via custom resource definitions and orchestration tools to manage system workflows declaratively.
1. **Demonstrating automated application deployments via Keptn declarative strategies** (32:37) — A robust live walkthrough applying specific Kubernetes resources to trigger validated application delivery across staging environments.
1. **Reviewing deployment workflows and encouraging open source community contributions** (38:25) — Summarizing the declarative deployment prototype architecture while establishing avenues for actively contributing to the orchestrator codebase.
1. **Questions on career paths and continuous delivery orchestration platforms** (41:21) — Insightful answers addressing operations engineering career progressions, team culture, and architectural differences between cluster deployment tools.

## Related Moments

- [Implementing declarative GitOps workflows using Keptn custom resources](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/372-a-practitioners-guide-to-gitops-introduction-principles-and-implementation) (from "A Practitioners Guide to GitOps - Introduction, Principles and Implementation")
- [Comparing Keptn orchestration capabilities against alternative software operators](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/372-a-practitioners-guide-to-gitops-introduction-principles-and-implementation) (from "A Practitioners Guide to GitOps - Introduction, Principles and Implementation")
- [Understanding principles and benefits of the GitOps workflow](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/852-securing-secrets-in-the-gitops-era) (from "Securing secrets in the GitOps Era")
- [Exploring the core benefits of adopting GitOps](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/547-how-to-gitops-your-cluster-with-flux) (from "How to GitOps your cluster with Flux")
- [Core principles and prerequisites of robust GitOps workflows](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/372-a-practitioners-guide-to-gitops-introduction-principles-and-implementation) (from "A Practitioners Guide to GitOps - Introduction, Principles and Implementation")
- [Managing cluster platform infrastructure via GitOps principles](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1582-llmops-driven-fine-tuning-evaluation-and-inference-with-nvidia-nim-nemo-microservices) (from "LLMOps-driven fine-tuning, evaluation, and inference with NVIDIA NIM & NeMo Microservices")

## Related Articles

- [Stop Googling Git Commands. Start Actually Learning Git.](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/730-stop-googling-git-commands-start-actually-learning-git)
- [MLops – Deploying, Maintaining And Evolving Machine Learning Models in Production](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/115-mlops-deploying-maintaining-and-evolving-machine-learning-models-in-production)
- [Learning Kubernetes made easy with KubeCampus](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/348-learning-kubernetes-made-easy-with-kubecampus)
- [How Microsoft worked around a Git limitation to shrink a repository by 94%](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/499-how-microsoft-worked-around-a-git-limitation-to-shrink-a-repository-by-94)

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