Cloud Native Application Delivery
Delivery principles
Cloud native delivery emphasizes small, immutable artifacts, automated pipelines, declarative deployment configuration, and fast, reversible releases. Build once and promote the same image by digest across environments rather than rebuilding per environment. Store images in a registry, scan them, sign them, and generate SBOMs for supply-chain assurance. Configuration belongs outside the image, typically in ConfigMaps, Secrets, or environment-specific overlays.
Tooling and patterns
CI builds and tests; CD deploys. GitOps treats Git as the source of truth and uses an in-cluster agent such as Argo CD or Flux to pull and reconcile desired state. Helm packages and templates Kubernetes manifests; Kustomize overlays environment-specific changes without templates. Progressive delivery reduces risk: canary sends a small slice of traffic to a new version, blue-green runs two full environments and switches traffic, and rolling updates replace replicas gradually.
Traps
GitOps is pull-based reconciliation, not a push pipeline that runs kubectl from CI. Helm is a package manager, not a runtime or an operator. Canary is traffic-weighted gradual exposure; blue-green is an all-at-once switch with instant rollback. Mutable image tags such as latest undermine reproducibility; prefer immutable digests. A successful CI build does not prove production health.
Rule of thumb
Ask “what is the source of truth and who applies it?” In GitOps, Git is the source of truth and the cluster agent applies it. Ask “how is risk limited?” Use canary for measured traffic shifts and blue-green for instant cutover and rollback.