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[CNCF Hosted] Shift-Left: Past, Present, and Future of Validation in CI for GitOps Workflows

Published Date
Author Stefan Schimanski

This session originally occurred at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2024 in Paris, hosted by the CNCF. It is posted and lives on their YouTube channel here.

Shift-Left: Past, Present, and Future of Validation in CI for GitOps Workflows - Alexander Zielenski, Google & Stefan Schimanski, Upbound

GitOps has become the de facto approach for managing configurations. However; without robust validation mechanisms, automated deployments can lead to unpredictable outcomes and high maintenance costs.

Up until now GitOps users have largely been on their own for this critical step of their pipeline. Ever see a CI hooked up to prod? Or dry-running against a cluster that takes 10 minutes to spin up? Or forget to update an ObjectReference? Many real world usages defer to spinning up an apiserver with hundreds of CRDs installed as part of CI/CD just to test their manifests, since nothing else is reliable; others resort to incomplete and incorrect JSON schema validations.

This is slow, expensive, and wastes valuable time.