Advantages of maintaining code in the git repository

About the Git

Git is an open source distributed version control system which is designed for simplicity, speed, fully distributed, integrity, and excelled support for parallel development. In the present scenario, most IT companies use Git for controlling their system; it was originally developed as an open-source project in 2005 by the founder of the Linux Operating System to maintain a matured and active working environment.

Let’s put some light on the supremacy of Git.

Advantages

1. Reliability and management of workflow

No matter in which domain your company serves, it will involve designing, evolution, product management, customer support, marketing, and many more. In such scenarios, the adoption of Git immensely impacts the way your organization delivers solutions to real-world problems. In Git, staging is an intermediate stage,  also called Staging Area, where application code is added before actually committing the changes. A distinct branching model lets your teamwork in an integrated development environment, each working differently.

2. Distributed development

In an organization, it’s quite obvious to have multiple teams working on the same project with different timelines and project goals. Git is a distributed VCS that enables each developer to have a track history of commitments. This points to the fact that there is no requirement for a dedicated connection between peers to verify differences between commits and inspect previous versions of files. In simpler words, collaboration is given a priority.

3. Enhanced productivity

Git has an edge over other version control systems.

It provides flexibility regarding modification in new codes commitment, an effortless merging of branches, and code optimization to achieve better performance. Significantly, git focuses on file content itself instead of file names while addressing the file version history and storage.

4. Security of commits

Git serves the purpose of the integrity of source code. It ensures the mappings between a file and commits, directories, tags, versions, etc. are secured cryptographically by using SHA1. Each commit refers to the parent’s hash. Meanwhile, each item in the commit has its hash as a reference, and the commit itself is also hashed. So modifying just one item results in a change of the complete hash of the commit. In simpler words, it’s quite tough to easily change the content of a file in a git repository.

5. Pull request

It’s obvious that in the development phase before merging the branches in the main branch, the Team lead needs to review the code for further optimizations. This reduces accidental damage to code in the production environment. In addition to this, it allows other developers to discuss their work before integrating the code with the codebase. This justifies the nature of collaboration in git.

6. Rapid prototyping

Consider you have your UI/UX designers and want to implement a new user flow or replace some icons, checking out a new branch provides them a sandboxed environment to play with. This proves a boon for designers to see how their changes will look in an application without breaking existing functionalities.

7. Agile culture

There is often a case when a customer usually experiences some kind of problem. If it is caused by your software product, immediate actions need to be taken and updates must be pushed as soon as possible. Git’s streamlined development cycles come as a savior without postponing bug fixes until the next monolithic release. A developer can patch the issue and push it directly to a production server. Quick fixes lead to happy customers.

8. Efficient resource management

When it comes to product delivery in an agile environment, it’s much more costly to waste time passing commits over network connections, as well as to integrate updates in centralized version control systems. In addition to this, you may also not worry about new interns working in a production environment. It also makes it feasible for developers to test new features/interfaces on the actual product with little overhead. Git serves as a multiplier for all of your business activities by assuring every department serves efficiently.

9. GitOps

Consider a scenario, A team observed a performance bottleneck in traffic to a server, and it came to their attention that the load balancer is not working as expected. In this scenario, they need to analyze the cause and thus deploy the changes accordingly. Here, DevOps may come into the light and the Engineer needs to head to the system and configure changes, likewise going to a specific resource deployed system.

GitOps become the game-changer in the above scenario.

A member of the team opens a new pull request which consists of an optimized configuration of the load balancer. This pull request is reviewed and approved by other team members and merged into the repository. This triggers the Gitops pipeline and the Gitops operator is triggered. Operator, if notices the changes with configuration, confirms with a system's orchestration tool. Consequently, the orchestration system updates the load balancer configuration.

Further, the newly configured load balancer is monitored to see if it returns to a healthy state.GitOps is an incredibly powerful workflow pattern for managing cloud infrastructure.

10. Ease of tracking progress

A commit in Git refers to the act of keeping a record of changes that your respective team has made in your codebase. It makes it easy to craft very granular changes, even down to the microscopic level: altered characters and lines in your source code.

Further, if a developer wants to compare two versions of a file, Git’s diff command will help highlight the differences between them. Moreover, you can document a bug fix by using some standard commit messages. e.g. XYZ bug fixed #89. In the future, if you encounter any similar bug, you can turn back to see, how it was resolved earlier

Industry use-case

As of now, we have discussed some advantages of Git. It’s time to explore some trending integration of industry-based scenarios. DevOps and Git integration has got an overwhelming response from all over the technology market and many of the Tech-Giants practice the principles, integrating both of them to maintain workflow of the project (Continuous Integration and Delivery pipeline (CI/CD)).

Consider a project which needs frequent updates and  Testing over a large infrastructure. In this case, DevOps engineer tends to set up CI/CD pipelines and processes. Changes made in your Git repository can trigger automated jobs to carry out build, deployments, and test pipelines phases automatically, removing the reliance on manual or timed processes.

Automatic triggering of CI/CD means that the team can build out complex testing and deployment scenarios, testing smaller changesets and identifying potential bugs earlier than when testing large changesets. A webhook is created between the Git system and the Continuous Integration system of choice. Once the change is made in git, a webhook is triggered and the associated pipeline executes. Depending on the project’s Git implementation, these changes can be detected either through a pull or push-based system. There are several products based on Git implementations such as GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket.

Once your code is ready or changes are made, we may need to configure the testing environment, rather than directly pushing the code-base over the production server.
This is concisely called a Staging Environment, where teams carry out demos to executives or last-minute test cases. Each of these environments is different.

Perhaps, required varying levels of configuration. Git can serve as the single source of truth in your DevOps workflow. You can store all the environmental configuration files defining details for each required environment, also you can roll back the changes if you want, and lastly but not least, Before pushing code to the server, you need infrastructure to be provisioned and configured and this is the first step towards Infrastructure as a Code. This is a powerful package of Git and DevOps Integration. You can talk about DevOps, maybe even dreaming about DevOps, but to achieve your goal you must be implementing the basic DevOps Infrastructure properly and easily. Utilizing Git uplifts the power of DevOps and assures the proper implementation of what is chalked out.

Thus, Git as a whole when integrated with other technologies serve the purpose of Agile Culture and helps business to compete in the market as the requirement arises.

Conclusion

Git is free and open-source software that is easy to use and allows tracking of all the previous modifications made to the project. Git has been proven useful for whether an individual or a team is working from remote areas or physically in-office. More and more developers are practicing Git as a core for software development lifecycle and management to improve the quality of their code and workflow.