If the above has gotten you excited, learn more here about GitOps, why it's important for your customers and how we are different.
Simply said - GitOps takes DevOps best practices used for application development such as version control, collaboration, compliance, and CI/CD, and applies them to infrastructure automation.
Hint: Click on the box to go directly to the relevant section
The persona interested in GitOps is in general different from your development or engineering organizations. They are most often from the operations, systems, infrastructure, platform and cloud side of the organization.
| Typical Roles | Typical Titles | |
|---|---|---|
| Economic Buyer | Director/VP/CIO of IT, Head of IT Infrastructure / Platform Engineering / Operations | SVP of Technology Operations, Sr. Manager Systems Engineering, Cloud Architect, Information Systems Architect |
| User | SRE, Infra Engineer, Sys Admin, Platform Engineer - have to execute frequent repetitive tasks to support dynamically changing elastic environments | DevOps engineer, Architect, Team Lead, DevOps Ninja |
More details here
| Infrastructure as code | GitOps | Infrastructure automation |
| Configuration as code | Policy as code | Approvals for infrastructure changes |
| Terraform | Ansible | AWS Cloud formation |
| Weaveworks Flux | Argo CD | Terraform Cloud |
Customers engage with our content from our website, collaterals, videos and campaigns. We can identify a customer's interest levels based on their latest activity - which you can see on SFDC.
If both of these include GitOps keywords or GitOps topics - ensure to have the GitOps conversation.
Marketing is running a related demand gen campaign.
| Challenges "before scenarios" | So What? "negative consequences" |
|---|---|
| - How does your infrastructure team manage configurations, policies, variables etc consistently across your infrastructure? | No consistency, no knowledge sharing, no version control, click ops |
| - Are you able to ensure that changes are reviewed and approved by the right individuals - to ensure minimal disruption to your staging / production environments? | Higher risk as unauthorized changes can be shipped to production - causing performance issues / downtime, high skilled / highly paid resources may be doing menial tasks |
| - Is your infrastructure team able to consistently repeat the steps to setup an environment every single time? | No standardization, manual process - more error prone |
More questions here
| Desired Future State (“After Scenarios”) | So What? (“Positive Business Outcomes”) |
|---|---|
| More automation | Less risk as manual repetitive tasks are error prone |
| Faster mean time to repair | Can be rolled back rapidly to a working definition of the infrastructure rather than troubleshooting before roll-back - resulting in faster time to repair |
| Faster time to value | Move from manual Click ops to GitOps to deploy more often |
| Compliant | Compliance is automated as every change is tracked |
| Reduced security exposure | All changes can be reviewed and approved, security for infrastructure code can be embedded within the pipeline |
'GitOps = Infrastructure as Code + Merge Request + CI/CD'
| Required capability | Customer Metrics |
|---|---|
| Version control for infrastructure code | Improved time to value - less manual, less error prone, more automated |
| Change control and collaboration for infrastructure | Lower change failure rate - more controls, more reviews and approvals |
| Compliance & Auditing | Lesser time spent in auditing, fewer compliance issues |
| CI/CD - test automation, pipeline configuration management | Higher deployment frequency - more automation |
| Rollback | Lower mean time to repair - can roll back to working definition of infra before troubleshooting |
Have you faced infrastructure downtime and have not been able to trace it back to who made the changes, what changes were made and who approved it? Infrastructure automation with GitLab helps you bring Application DevOps best practices of collaboration, version control, CI/CD & Compliance to Infrastructure.
Unlike other vendors, GitOps with GitLab helps you manage physical, virtual and cloud native infrastructures. We use a tight integration with industry-leading infrastructure automation tools like Terraform, AWS Cloud Formation, and the like to meet you where you are - all with a single application.
Detailed section on How GitLab meets the market requirements here
More details here
Primary competitors: Flux (Weaveworks), Argo CD, Terraform Cloud Secondary competitors: Codefresh, Transposit, Red Hat/IBM
Detailed competitive against primary competitors here
Typical questions:
Detailed list of Q&A here
How to identify if you need to lead with a GitOps conversation?
How to identify if you need to have to lead with a GitOps conversation?
How to identify if you need to have a GitOps conversation with a lead?
Here are a few recommended email templates you can use based on the stage of the customers journey.
GitLab Professional Services help customers become efficient in GitLab quickly. GitLab (or a GitLab partner) offers a number of service offerings to support customers.
For the GitOps sales play, consider asking your customer about their workforce's proficiency with git, GitLab, and GitLab CI as they are foundational elements to GitOps. If they are not strong in all of these topics, consider positioning GitLab with git Basics training and/or GitLab CI/CD training.
Advisory/Consulting services to help with GitOps rollout are planned to be rolled out later this year. Please register your interest for a GitOps Advisory offering here to help PS effectively prioritize!
As you position services, you can use our Services Pitch Deck to help establsh the value of engaging with PS. Other services can be found in our Complete list of professional service offerings
Talk with @em in the professional services slack channel to learn more.
Last interesting moment is in the Marketing info section of SFDC
Top content consumed by time - is in the Pathfactory for sales section of SFDC
