Glossary

GitOps

GitOps is the practice of managing infrastructure and deployments through Git as the single source of truth. The desired system state is described in a repository; a dedicated operator automatically synchronises the real state with the declared one.

Key principles

Declarative — infrastructure state is described in files (Kubernetes manifests, Helm charts)
Git as single source — every change goes through a Pull Request with review and CI
Automatic sync — an operator (ArgoCD, Flux) watches Git and applies changes
Observability — easy to compare the cluster's current state with what is described in Git

GitOps vs CI/CD Push

Push — the CI pipeline deploys directly (kubectl apply). Requires credentials in CI
Pull (GitOps) — an operator inside the cluster pulls changes from Git. Smaller attack surface

Tools

ArgoCD and Flux CD are the most popular GitOps operators for Kubernetes.