Not so long ago, I had a chance to get my hands dirty with improving the deployment flow of a project. Gitops was mentioned pretty regularly when I did my research. The more I read about it, the more I like the idea because I was always complaining why do I have to wait for the CI to build when I just change some random YAML file to update my deployment, it is a huge waste of time. In this series, I am going to write down the process from almost zero knowledge about gitops to having a functional gitops flow for a small team of around 40 engineers with 10+ services. This post is mostly about finding and evaluating different solutions.

In the previous part, I’ve shown how to set up a simple swarm cluster with 1 master and 2 worker nodes. In this part, I’m gonna continue with how to configure it to work with gitlab and also achieve zero downtime deployment.

Being able to develop an application of any kind and automatically deploy it is the norm nowadays. I have been using dokku in my personal deployment stack for several years now. And at work, we are using Kubernetes. I love the idea of Kubernetes but wanted to try something else, and came across docker swarm mode. In this blog post series, I’m gonna describe the process of setting up a docker swarm cluster, putting traefik in front as a reverse proxy and automatically deploying via gitlab without downtime.