GitOps
GitOps is a deployment methodology, coined by Weaveworks in 2017, in which the desired state of infrastructure and applications is declared in Git and reconciled to running systems by an automated agent. Every change goes through a pull request; the cluster state is whatever Git says it should be; reverts are git reverts.
GitOps's two practical implementations are Flux and Argo CD — agents that watch a Git repository and apply changes to a Kubernetes cluster (or other reconcilable target) until reality matches the declaration. Benefits: every change is reviewable, auditable, and revertible; the cluster is reproducible from Git; the deployment process is the same as the code review process. Trade-offs: increased complexity for very small environments; the model assumes declarative infrastructure (works perfectly for K8s, requires adaptation for other targets); secrets management requires care (encrypted-in-Git approaches like Sealed Secrets or external secret stores). Pairs naturally with infrastructure as code.
Related terms
- Infrastructure as code
Infrastructure as code (IaC) is the practice of defining and provisioning infrastructure — servers, networks, databases, IAM policies — through machine-readable declaration files rather than manual configuration.
- Continuous deployment
Continuous deployment automatically deploys every change that passes the test suite into production — no human gate between merging code and serving traffic.