When managing one or more clusters, the question arises as to how cluster configurations and applications can be installed securely, regularly, and in the same way. This is where the so-called GitOps approach helps, according to the mantra: "If it is not in Git, it does not exist".

The idea is to have Git as the only source of truth on what happens inside the environment. While there are many articles about how to get GitOps into the deployment process of applications, this series of articles tries to set the focus on the cluster configuration and tasks system administrators usually have to do, for example: Setup an Operator.

Installing and configuring Quay Enterprise using a GitOps approach is not as easy as it sounds. On the one hand, the operator is deployed easily, on the other hand, the configuration of Quay is quite tough to do in a declarative way and syntax rules must be strictly followed.

In this article, I am trying to explain how I solved this issue by using a Kubernetes Job and a Helm Chart.

At this point we have checked our source code, verified that it has been signed and has no vulnerabilities, generated a SBOM and updated the Kubernetes manifests, that are responsible to deploy our application on OpenShift. As everything with OpenShift these Kubernetes objects are simple yaml files. In this step we will perform a linting on these files, to verify if they follow certain rules and best practices.

With the finalization of the build process and the security checks during this phase, it is now time to update the Kubernetes manifests and provide the new tag for the created image. I have forked (and cleaned up) another repository that will store all yaml specifications that are required for OpenShift. You can find this repository at: Kubernetes Manifests

A software bill of materials (SBOM) offers an insight into the makeup of an application developed using third-party commercial tools and open-source software. It is a machine-readable, formally structured list of all components. This list is important to gain visibility into what risks might exist in a package and their potential impact. It allows to prioritize the risks and define a remediation path. The teams can use the SBOM to monitor all components that are used across an application.

We will create a Task that will generate a SBOM and uploads it into an SBOM repository.

In this step we will install Advanced Cluster Security (ACS) and create 2 new steps in our Pipeline to scan the image for vulnerabilities and security policy. A custom security policy, configured in ACS, will verify if the image is signed.

Finally, after pulling and checking the code, we are going to create the image. During this process the image will be signed and uploaded to the public registry Quay.io.

Besides checking the source code quality, we should also verify if the commit into Git was done by someone/something we trust. It is a good practice to sign all commits to Git. You need to prepare your Git account and create trusted certificates.

After the Pipeline has been created and tested we will add another Task to verify the source code and check for possible security issues, leveraging the tool SonarQube by Sonar.

We will now create the Pipeline and try to trigger it for the first time to verify if our Webhook works as intended.