What is GitOps?
An explanation of the GitOps methodology, its principles, and how it changes the way teams manage infrastructure and deployments.
Overview
GitOps is an operational framework that applies DevOps best practices used for application development — such as version control, collaboration, compliance, and CI/CD — to infrastructure automation.
Core Principles
1. Declarative Configuration
The entire system is described declaratively. Instead of writing imperative scripts that describe how to reach a state, you declare what the desired state looks like.
# Declarative: what you want
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: web-app
spec:
replicas: 32. Git as the Single Source of Truth
Git repositories hold the complete desired state of your infrastructure. Every change goes through a pull request, providing an audit trail, review process, and rollback mechanism.
3. Automated Reconciliation
An operator continuously compares the actual state of the system with the desired state in Git. When drift is detected, the operator automatically reconciles the difference.
4. Pull-Based Deployment
Unlike traditional CI/CD where a pipeline pushes changes to the cluster, GitOps agents pull changes from Git. This is more secure because the cluster doesn’t need to expose credentials to the CI system.
GitOps vs Traditional CI/CD
| Aspect | Traditional CI/CD | GitOps |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment trigger | Pipeline push | Git commit + reconciliation |
| Source of truth | CI server config | Git repository |
| Drift detection | Manual / none | Automatic |
| Rollback | Re-run pipeline | git revert |
Tools
- Flux - CNCF graduated project for Kubernetes GitOps
- ArgoCD - Declarative continuous delivery for Kubernetes
- Crossplane - Extends GitOps to cloud infrastructure
When to Use GitOps
GitOps works best when:
- You manage multiple environments (dev, staging, prod)
- You need a clear audit trail of all changes
- You want automated drift detection and correction
- Your team is already comfortable with Git workflows