
During much of my tech career, I dealt in precision. Precision tolerances for hardware products. Precise specifications for software. marketing language that favored exactitude. Oh wait. That last one is
During much of my tech career, I dealt in precision. Precision tolerances for hardware products. Precise specifications for software. marketing language that favored exactitude.
Oh wait. That last one is not entirely true. In fact, even in technical marketing where precise language would seem to be appreciated, vague and even obtuse language is often rewarded. This drives plausible deniability which, in turn, benefits companies when products don’t work as advertised. It’s true across all products, even IT ones. More importantly, it allows marketers to set their products apart from otherwise similar ones.
That brings me to my latest pet peeve – the term GitOps. This particular rant started on Mastodon after a tech journalist I respect a lot (one of the few that grok the technical stuff) wrote an article referencing the term. The article was, as usual, excellent. The title, however, lit my fuse about GitOps.
My complaint is that GitOps is just another name for Continuous Integration (CI) or maybe Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment(CI/CD). To be more charitable, it was CI using some variant of the open source git (and yes it’s lower case) project. GitOps is, in my opinion, an example of slicing the baloney too thin. So thin, in fact that it becomes meaningless.
At that point, one of the maintainers of the OpenGitOps project, Roberth Strand, pointed me at the project’s website. I appreciate that, by the way. It’s always a sign of good community when members suggest resources to each other. Mr. Strand especially wanted me to look at the the guiding principles of GitOps. They are 1 :
What you may notice is lacking is any mention of git itself. That’s right, GitOps doesn’t require git at all. Why call it GitOps then? Weird, right?
The other thing that is immediately noticeable is that these principles would apply to most CI systems. Granted some are not driven by declarative languages, but I would argue most are. Ultimately this looks like a specific implementation of CI.
Back to our baloney. This is an example of trying to create an entire category – be it software, product, or community – from a specific case of an existing term. It’s good marketing. Afraid you might drown in the growing sea of CI/CD products, projects, and companies? Narrow the scope and call it something else. Now whatever you are doing sounds new and fresh. Yay!
The downside is, of course, confusion. It walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, but everyone is told it’s not a duck. Instead, consumers (IT pros in this case) are told to believe that a Mallard is different from a duck. The proliferation of technical terms that mean almost the same thing or that are just subsets of subsets makes decision making much harder. Consumers have to spend too much time just figuring out the starting point.
I suspect that enough companies and organizations such as the CNCF have taken up the term GitOps that it is here to stay. There’s no turning back. What is important is that GitOps not be seen as anything more than a specific case of CI, which is only part of the CI/CD pipeline landscape. Ignore the marketing and look under the covers. You might need some CI software or processes, and they may be called GitOps. You don’t need both and they are not competing with each other, except for the marketing.
Source: OpenGitOps, https://opengitops.dev/
I know; It’s been awhile. Instead of writing about technology, I’ve been writing about new popular music. I still love technology but writing about music is more rewarding. You can check out my blog at Tunes Past To Present. There you will find reviews about new music that appeals to an… let’s say more mature… audience.
That’s not what this blog is about. It is about Mastodon and why it’s so much better than TWITer… I mean Twitter. For those who are unfamiliar with Mastodon, it is a microblogging platform that is, in some ways, similar to Twitter. Unlike Facebook or LinkedIn, you can have one way connections with people. With Mastodon, you can follow individuals and see what they are posting, just like Twitter. That’s where the similarities end.
So, here are my 7 reasons why Mastodon is better than Twitter.
What’s the big negative? The Mastodon server I’m on, linernotes.club – a server dedicated to music, is so engaging that I’m already spending too much time on it. I used to publish on Twitter, but never spend much time reading posts. It was fire and forget. Mastodon has the potential to become a giant time suck. That’s really not a bad thing.
Mastodon delivers community, helps discover new people and content, and provides a more healthy environment than Twitter. Twitter is none of the above and I have doubts about it as a going concern. You can’t lose more than half (probably a lot more than half) of your engineers and keep the system running as is, let alone continue to evolve it. It’s probably done like dinner. One thing I’ve learned in nearly 40 years in IT is not to stay in the dumpster when it’s on fire. I can smell Twitter burning from across the country.
If you want to follow me on Mastodon, you can find me at @DJMRP@linernotes.club from most Mastodon servers. Or join linernotes.club. It’s a great community.