What is GitOps and Why You Should Use It
GitOps is an operational framework built on DevOps best practices such as version control, CI/CD, and collaboration. It applies them to infrastructure automation, allowing developers to declare the desired state of the system and avoid manual changes or relying on ad-hoc scripts. GitOps is applied from the beginning of the development workflow, all the way to deployment. Thanks to that, software delivery becomes more predictable, transparent, and secure. In this article, we break down what GitOps really means, how it works in practice, and why more and more teams are adopting it.
How GitOps Works
GitOps puts developers at the center by relying on tools they already know—mainly Git. Since most developers already manage their application source code with Git, GitOps simply expands that workflow to cover infrastructure, configuration, and day-to-day operations too. Everything from infrastructure as code to app configs and deployment logic lives in Git repos, creating a single, versioned source of truth. Any changes made to applications and infrastructure are automatically synched with the live environment, with no need for manual intervention.
GitOps is particularly powerful in cloud-native environments that are built for speed and scale. It brings order, automation, and scalability to systems that are complex. By using Git to declare and control cloud resources, teams can automate provisioning, enforce compliance, and quickly recover from failures.
What Challenges You Can Solve With GitOps
Here are examples of which challenges you can overcome with GitOps:
- Inconsistent configurations – even when using centralized configuration, the actual state and the declared one can change with manual processes, bringing about the risk of unpredictable behavior.
- Limited visibility into the state of applications: developers sometimes struggle to understand where and how an application is running. This results in time-consuming investigations examining current infrastructure.
- Unreliable disaster recovery: deployments that fail result in unplanned downtime impacting users and slowing down developer workflows.
- Lack of detailed documentation – it is not uncommon for teams to struggle to find information on how certain applications were built, deployed, or managed.
- Dependence on an undefined state – Relying on a previously working but not clearly defined or versioned system state introduces unpredictability.
Not sure how to implement GitOps in your software development? We can help.
Business and Technical GitOps Benefits
In high-performing DevOps organizations, it is common to deploy code to production hundreds of times per day. Through adopting GitOps such teams can accomplish this much faster and it becomes easier to audit.
Key benefits of GitOps include:
- A unified workflow: GitOps uses Git as the core interface for managing both application and infrastructure changes. Thanks to that, it’s easy for developers to adopt GitOps without learning entirely new tools or processes.
- Increased security: since every change is tracked, versioned, and auditable through Git, GitOps provides greater visibility and auditability.
- Improved reliability: GitOps enables automated rollbacks, precise change tracking, and easy recovery from failures by reverting to a known good state.
- Consistency across environments: with GitOps, deployments are consistent and reproducible everywhere.
Why GitOps Is Important for Modern Infrastructure Management
With the demands of modern infrastructure, automation becomes increasingly important. Cloud-native environments require flexibility, scalability, and resilience, which are difficult to achieve through just manual processes. GitOps addresses this challenge by providing a declarative, automated approach to infrastructure and application management. With the use of GitOps, developers can manage deployments the same way they manage code.
GitOps is especially valuable for platform engineers and developers working with Kubernetes where workloads are dynamic and components are constantly shifting. That said, it can be used with any infrastructure that can be described declaratively and managed with Infrastructure as Code tools—including virtual machines, cloud services, serverless environments, and more.
Core GitOps Workflow Components
A standard GitOps workflow is built around four components:
1. Git repository
This element serves as the foundation of any GitOps workflow. It serves as the central source of truth for both application code and configuration. By storing all critical information in the Git repository, teams can achieve full visibility throughout the development and deployment process.
2. Continuous integration (CI) pipeline
The CI pipeline is responsible for building and testing code. Once changes are validated, the pipeline outputs versioned artifacts and updates the Git repository with any configuration changes. From there, deployment is handled by GitOps tools—not the CI/CD pipeline itself—ensuring a clear separation between build and deployment.
3. GitOps controller
The GitOps controller continuously monitors the Git repository for changes. When a new commit updates the desired state, the controller automatically reconciles the live environment to match Git. This enables automated, consistent, and auditable deployments without manual triggers or push-based scripts.
4. Reconciliation loop
At the heart of GitOps is a continuous reconciliation process. The GitOps controller checks the actual state of the environment against the declared state in Git. If drift is detected, it automatically brings the system back in sync, ensuring reliability, self-healing, and rollback capabilities.
Main GitOps Tools
Developers can work with many tools to build a GitOps framework. Here’s an overview of some of the most commonly used GitOps tools, and how they support core GitOps principles in real-world software development projects.
Continuous integration (CI) tools
CI tools automate the process of building, testing, and verifying code changes before they become merged. In a GitOps model, CI plays a role in preparing application artifacts and infrastructure configuration that will be stored in Git repository and later deployed through automated CD systems.
- Tekton
Tekton is a Kubernetes-native tooling set to create resilient CI pipelines. It helps DevOps build development pipelines that are well integrated with cloud infrastructure to provide fast feedback through automated integration testing and building. Tekton is best suited for Git-based development workflows and is typically paired with GitOps CD tools to automate the entire pipeline.
- Jenkins / GitLab CI / GitHub Actions
These popular CI tools let teams automate testing of code, creation of artifacts, and linting of infrastructure config files. They are the front-end to a GitOps workflow, driving tested code and config into Git repositories for deployment.
- CI/CD pipelines with Git integration
Any CI tool that supports Git as a source control system can be utilized for GitOps. The idea is that it produces artifacts and configuration files stored in a Git repository.
Continuous delivery (CD) tools
CD tools automate the process of chainging the desired state on the environment. In GitOps, they continuously poll Git repositories to guarantee that the desired state declared in version-controlled configuration files matches the current state of the deployed infrastructure.
- Argo CD
Argo CD is a declarative, GitOps-native CD tool for Kubernetes. It syncs the desired state from Git repositories with the actual state of Kubernetes-based infrastructure so that applications are deployed consistently and reliably across environments. It includes support for Git pull requests for approving changes and a full audit log of the deployment process.
- Flux
Flux is a tool that automates application deployment and infrastructure updates based on Git commits. It applies continuous delivery by synchronizing Kubernetes clusters with Git repositories, watching configuration files, and managing rollback, drift detection, and reconciliation.
- Helm & Kustomize
They are configuration tools used to manage Kubernetes manifests. While not CD tools themselves, they integrate with GitOps controllers like Argo CD and Flux to support modular, environment-specific deployments.
- Terraform (for Infrastructure as Code)
Though not a CD tool itself, Terraform is an important part of GitOps workflows in that it enables the provisioning of infrastructure through code. In conjunction with GitOps CD tooling, Terraform enables teams to manage cloud resources and impose infrastructure changes through pull requests and version-controlled workflows.
GitOps and DevOps: Differences
GitOps and DevOps are closely connected, but they are not the same. Both aim to improve efficiency, collaboration, and speed in delivering software but operate differently in trying to achieve these goals and aim at different areas within the development process. Moreover, GitOps is essentially a method of managing deployments within DevOps. Think of GitOps as a way to “do Ops the Git way” inside DevOps.
At its core, DevOps is a cultural and procedural shift that brings together development and operations teams. At its core, it encourages collaboration, continuous feedback, and shared ownership of outcomes across the entire software development lifecycle. DevOps practices include everything from integration testing and CI/CD pipelines to infrastructure changes, monitoring, and incident response.
GitOps, on the other hand, is a specific operational framework built on DevOps principles—but focused heavily on deployment automation, infrastructure configuration, and infrastructure as code.
GitOps Adoption Strategy
Adopting GitOps practices does not mean changing your entire setup overnight. You can start small and build on existing processes. Begin by defining your application and infrastructure configuration declaratively in Git. Treat Git as the single source of truth. Use your CI pipeline to build and test code, and integrate a GitOps controller (like Argo CD or Flux) to automatically deploy updates by syncing from Git. For infrastructure, tools like Terraform can be used to define cloud infrastructure.
Apply GitOps principles by managing changes through pull requests, ensuring every update is version-controlled and auditable. Pair Terraform with automation tools like Atlantis or Terraform Cloud for reconciliation. Start small—maybe with a development environment or a single app—and scale adoption gradually as teams become more familiar with GitOps workflows.
If you need support adopting GitOps or DevOps, reach out—we’re here to help.
Check Out Our DevOps Services
Contact us!
Send us an email: [email protected]