What Is GitOps?

Teams need a reliable, secure, and automated way to manage infrastructure and application deployments. That’s where GitOps comes in. It’s not just another buzzword — GitOps is a powerful approach that brings the best of Git, DevOps, and automation into one clean workflow.

In this first part of the series, we’ll demystify GitOps, explain its core concepts, and explore why it’s rapidly becoming the standard for cloud-native development.

GitOps is a way of managing infrastructure and application configurations using Git as the single source of truth, combined with automation tools that make sure the actual state of your system always matches what’s in Git.

In traditional systems, developers or sysadmins might manually log in to servers, run scripts, or update configurations on the fly. While this might work short-term, it’s not scalable or safe — changes can be lost, hard to track, or inconsistent.

In a GitOps workflow, everything — from infrastructure definitions to app configurations — lives in a Git repository. If you want to make a change, you commit it to Git. A GitOps tool (like FluxCD or ArgoCD) watches for changes, and automatically applies them to your system.

Core Concepts of GitOps

To fully understand GitOps, let’s go over its four main building blocks:

Declarative Configuration

A system is declarative when you tell it what you want, not how to do it.

For example, instead of running commands to create three instances of your app, you write a YAML file that declares, “I want 3 replicas of this app running.” Then a tool like Kubernetes or Flux takes care of the rest.

Here’s a simple Kubernetes example:

apiVersion: apps/v1  
kind: Deployment  
metadata:  
  name: my-app  
spec:  
  replicas: 3  
  template:  
    metadata:  
      labels:  
        app: my-app  
    spec:  
      containers:  
      - name: my-container  
        image: my-image:latest

This file doesn’t tell Kubernetes how to create pods, containers, or networking. It just says what you want. GitOps relies heavily on this declarative model — because it’s predictable, repeatable, and auditable.

Version-Controlled System (Using Git)

In GitOps, Git becomes your source of truth.

All configuration — whether it’s your infrastructure (like Kubernetes resources, Terraform modules) or your application deployments — lives inside a Git repository.

This offers several advantages:

• Traceability: You can track who made what change, when, and why.
• Collaboration: Teams can use Pull Requests (PRs) to review changes before they are applied.
• Rollback: If something breaks, you can easily roll back by reverting the Git commit.
• History: You have a full log of changes for compliance, debugging, and audits.

In short, Git isn’t just for code anymore — it’s for your entire system.

Automatic Reconciliation

This is where the magic of GitOps really shines.

Reconciliation means constantly comparing two things:

• The desired state (what’s defined in Git)
• The actual state (what’s running in your environment)

A GitOps controller (such as FluxCD or ArgoCD) checks Git regularly. If it sees a change — for example, someone updated a deployment configuration — it automatically applies that change to your cluster.

Even more powerful: If someone manually changes something in the cluster (outside Git), the controller will detect the difference and reset it to match Git. This ensures consistency and prevents “drift.”

Pull-Based Deployments

Traditional CI/CD pipelines often push changes to servers. That means your CI tool needs access credentials, which can be a security risk.

GitOps flips this model.

Instead of pushing changes, a GitOps tool pulls changes from Git. Your cluster reaches out to Git to fetch new updates — not the other way around. This is called a pull-based approach.

Benefits of pull-based deployments include:

• Improved security: Your cluster holds the credentials and pulls changes securely.
• Better firewall compatibility: It works with internal or firewalled systems without needing external access.
• Cleaner workflows: All deployment logic happens inside the cluster, reducing complexity.

Why Use GitOps?

Still not convinced? Let’s look at why GitOps is winning hearts across DevOps teams:

Everything Is in Git

All infrastructure and app definitions are version-controlled. No more guessing what’s deployed where. You have a full history and audit trail of your systems.

Easy Rollbacks

Made a mistake? Just revert the Git commit and the GitOps controller will bring the system back to that state — no need for complicated rollback scripts.

Automated, Repeatable Deployments

Automation reduces human error and ensures consistency. Once your GitOps setup is running, deploying becomes as easy as git push.

Security and Compliance

Less manual access to production environments means reduced risk. Changes are reviewed, approved, and applied through Git — providing an auditable process.

Full Transparency

Everything that happens is tracked. Everyone on the team can see what’s running, what changed, and why.

What’s Next?

In the next blog post, we’ll go through Git and GitHub basics specifically for GitOps workflows. We’ll show how to structure your repositories, create branches, and use Pull Requests effectively to manage your infrastructure like a pro.

Even if you’re already comfortable with Git, we’ll explore tips and patterns that are unique to GitOps.

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