GitOps applies the principles of version control and pull request workflows to infrastructure and application deployment. By using Git as the single source of truth for declarative infrastructure, teams gain auditability, reproducibility, and a familiar collaboration model for operations.
How GitOps Works in Practice
In a GitOps workflow, the desired state of infrastructure and applications is defined in Git repositories. Automated agents like ArgoCD or Flux continuously reconcile the actual state of the environment with the declared state in Git, automatically applying changes when commits are merged.
This approach transforms deployments from imperative scripts to declarative configurations. Instead of running commands to update a Kubernetes deployment, an engineer updates a YAML manifest and submits a pull request. Code review, automated testing, and approval workflows apply to infrastructure changes just as they do to application code.
GitOps also simplifies disaster recovery and environment replication. Since the complete state of an environment is captured in Git, recreating it is as simple as pointing the GitOps agent at the repository. This makes spinning up staging environments, recovering from failures, and migrating between cloud providers significantly more manageable.