Goals

As a developer, I want to update the manifests for my application (deployment, statefulsets, etc) in the Git repository with new images built through my CI pipeline so that I don't have to manually update manifests for each image build.

Application images are usually built frequently on every Git change through the CI pipeline which result in new tags or digests for the image. In order to deploy these new images through the GitOps workflow, the image reference in the Kubernetes manifests for the application needs to get updated in the Git repositories which is manual and error-prone. This is effectively an imagestream-like feature but instead of triggering deployments, it would trigger a PR in the gitops repository

What's the problem?

Once you do a push to your trunk branch, we build an image and push it to your image repository. How do you get that image deployed into new environments? The simple case, promotion to your "dev" environment, can be handled with https://github.com/gitops-tools/image-updater. This allows you to patch your "Deployment" with the newly promoted image.

We need to trigger tests in each new environment, and when some criteria are met, trigger promotion (by patching the resource) to trigger deployment to the "next" environments.

Related Work

• https://github.com/gitops-tools/image-updater
• Argo CD Image Updater