From Snowflake Servers to Snowflake Clusters - The GitOps Journey

At MasterCard, we have a unique hard requirement of one dedicated cluster per application due to security and other challenges. In an effort to prevent snowflake clusters, we provided a base set of se …

At MasterCard, we have a unique hard requirement of one dedicated cluster per application due to security and other challenges. In an effort to prevent snowflake clusters, we provided a base set of services for logging, monitoring, etc.; however, application teams inevitably want to customize their logging solution or add a monitoring dashboard. We realized this mix of standard and optional services could quickly get out of control and needed normalization. In early 2018, we exposed application teams to Kubernetes manifests; they were excited about control over deployments, but unprepared for the complexity. By late 2018, we needed to minimize complexity and find a way to express high-level application needs, while providing secure, scalable and redundant deployments. This is our journey of how we embraced GitOps, and the challenges we faced making deployment descriptions minimalistic.