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# GitOps for the people

Forcing business stakeholders to learn Git slows down delivery. See how one fintech team accelerated their GitOps pipeline by triggering automated Kubernetes deployments directly from Jira tickets.

- **Speakers:** Lian Li
- **Event:** World Congress 2022
- **Published:** June 15, 2022
- **Duration:** 28:45
- **URL:** https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/461-gitops-for-the-people

## Summary

In highly regulated industries like fintech, software delivery is often choked by manual quality assurance, inconsistent environments, and rigid compliance requirements. This case study of a fictionalized 200-engineer organization, Money Bank, illustrates the transition from a dreaded, bottlenecked manual release process to a streamlined automated pipeline. By embedding QA directly into development teams and adopting Kubernetes to standardize environments, the company laid the groundwork for GitOps. Utilizing tools like Argo CD and OpenShift, the initial transformation automated deployments to development and staging environments. Interestingly, replacing the manual release manager role with automated pipelines resulted in fewer production bugs, proving that "people are more fallible than machines" when executing repetitive delivery tasks.

Despite the technical success of the GitOps implementation, the delivery cycle remained slow because non-technical stakeholders and managers were disconnected from the pull request process. Recognizing that business stakeholders rely on issue trackers rather than version control, the engineering team pioneered a "ReleaseOps" workflow using Jira as the primary deployment interface. By tightly integrating Jira with Bitbucket and Tekton pipelines, state changes on a ticket automatically triggered code merges, continuous integration builds, and progressive deployments. This bridged the gap between technical execution and business oversight, enabling product owners to test and approve staging deployments through automated Jira notifications while preserving the necessary human gatekeepers for production compliance.

This evolution highlights a critical lesson in cloud-native transformations: organizational change requires starting with familiar tools before introducing radical shifts. Initially relying on Jenkins for familiarity before migrating to cloud-native Tekton pipelines minimized developer friction. Ultimately, giving non-technical stakeholders a comfortable entry point into a highly technical CI/CD process accelerated delivery without sacrificing security. As Kelsey Hightower notes, infrastructure teams essentially want a custom platform-as-a-service, a philosophy that drives the modern rise of internal developer platforms (IDPs) and virtual cluster technologies designed to tailor Kubernetes specifically to internal organizational needs.

**Keywords:** gitops deployment, kubernetes infrastructure, argocd continuous delivery, releaseops workflow, jira pipeline integration, fintech compliance automation, cloud-native transformation, openshift pipelines, tekton CI/CD, internal developer platform, automated quality assurance, pull request bottleneck, software delivery lifecycle, virtual kubernetes clusters

## Chapters

1. **Introduction to the speaker and fintech company case study** (00:05) — Background on consulting experiences frames the fictional fintech organization structure.
1. **Assessing delivery bottlenecks and proposing automated quality assurance** (03:59) — Manual delivery steps and siloed testing workflows drive the adoption of embedded QA.
1. **Adopting Kubernetes and GitOps for standardized deployment environments** (06:35) — Moving to Kubernetes and GitOps solves environment drift and provides built-in audit trails.
1. **Explaining the basic architecture and declarative nature of GitOps** (08:28) — Using Git as a single source of truth for desired state simplifies cluster synchronization.
1. **Mapping the original manual delivery and release management process** (09:43) — Cherry-picking and manual stage hand-offs create unnecessary friction for the release manager.
1. **Automating development and staging deployments to reduce pipeline friction** (12:10) — Replacing manual hand-offs with automated builds and deployments streamlines the path to staging.
1. **Implementing initial GitOps architecture with Jenkins and Argo CD** (13:21) — An initial delivery pipeline relies on Jenkins to update configurations and Argo CD to sync clusters.
1. **Handling compliance requirements for production deployments using pull requests** (14:52) — Retaining manual gatekeepers for production through pull requests satisfies strict fintech compliance regulations.
1. **Integrating issue tracking to automate approvals for non-technical stakeholders** (16:17) — Tying deployment triggers to issue ticket state changes accelerates approvals from non-technical managers.
1. **Updating the delivery architecture with Jira and Tekton pipelines** (20:51) — Upgrading to cloud-native Tekton pipelines allows Jira ticket statuses to fully orchestrate deployments.
1. **Empowering developers through internal platforms and self-service infrastructure** (23:03) — Tailoring internal developer platforms reduces infrastructure complexity and empowers product engineering teams.
1. **Answering audience questions on DevOps and deployment tooling choices** (24:47) — Audience questions cover tool selection rationale, staging environment testing, and handling failing deployment pipelines.

## Related Moments

- [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")
- [Strategies for advocating GitOps within engineering teams](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/267-gitops-the-past-present-and-future) (from "GitOps: The past, present and future")
- [Introduction to GitOps and the Argo CD presentation](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/108-get-ready-for-operations-by-pull-requests) (from "Get ready for operations by pull requests")
- [The ongoing role of continuous integration pipelines in GitOps](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/267-gitops-the-past-present-and-future) (from "GitOps: The past, present and future")
- [Applying GitOps practices outside of Kubernetes environments](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/267-gitops-the-past-present-and-future) (from "GitOps: The past, present and future")
- [Architecture of a GitOps backup pipeline demonstration](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/757-integrating-backups-into-your-gitops-pipeline) (from "Integrating backups into your GitOps Pipeline")

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