What is GitOps?

What is GitOps?

GitOps is a way of managing infrastructure and applications in which Git holds the declarative definition of the entire system, and automated tooling keeps the running environment in sync with what Git says. Rather than making changes directly against a cluster or a server, you commit a change to a Git repository, and a GitOps tool applies it for you.

It extends Infrastructure as Code by adding a workflow around the code: everything is version-controlled, every change is reviewed and recorded, and the repository, not a person running commands, becomes the interface to your environment. That is what makes GitOps such a natural fit for cloud-native systems like Kubernetes.

The history of GitOps

The term GitOps was coined by Weaveworks in 2017, building on the established practices of continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment (CI/CD). It took the version control, review, and automation that teams already used for application code and applied the same discipline to infrastructure and deployments.

How does GitOps work?

GitOps solves problems that often plague plain Infrastructure as Code, such as configuration scattered across machines, or several people changing and applying it without telling one another. It does this by following a few principles: consolidate all configuration code in one place, track it in a Git repository, and disallow direct changes to the running system. Instead of applying changes by hand, everyone commits and pushes them to Git.

From there, a GitOps tool continuously scans the repository for changes. When it detects an update, it automatically applies the new configuration to the environment. The goal is simple but powerful: the running infrastructure should always match the state defined in Git. That eliminates drift between what is deployed and what is described in code, and it leaves a detailed record of every change and who made it.

The four core principles of GitOps

GitOps rests on four principles that together make infrastructure management consistent, transparent, and auditable.

Benefits of GitOps

Because Git sits at the centre, GitOps improves collaboration: team members work through version control, change tracking, and history, which brings coordination and transparency across teams. It also enhances security by leaning on Git's own features, such as access control and signed commits, so only authorized changes reach the infrastructure.

The declarative, automated model increases reliability by reducing human error and keeping environments consistent, and it enables faster recovery, since a clear history of changes makes it easy to roll back to a previous known-good state. Together these make GitOps an ideal fit for modern, cloud-native environments.

What is ArgoCD?

ArgoCD is an open-source, declarative, GitOps-based continuous delivery tool built specifically for Kubernetes. It automates the synchronization between the desired application state defined in a Git repository and the actual state running in a Kubernetes cluster, so deploying becomes a matter of committing to Git.

Its key features follow directly from the GitOps model. ArgoCD keeps all Kubernetes resource configurations declarative and version-controlled in Git, automatically detects and deploys changes as they are committed, and gives you real-time visibility into the health and status of applications in the cluster. It also makes rollbacks to a previous configuration easy, maintains a detailed history of changes, and offers fine-grained access control and multi-tenancy so multiple teams can manage their applications independently.

Git repository best practices for GitOps

In GitOps, your Git workflow is the core of every deployment, so how you structure your repositories matters. A handful of practices keep the process clean and secure.

Keep application code and configuration (YAML) in separate repositories, so a configuration change does not trigger an unnecessary application rebuild and the two can follow independent lifecycles. Separate environments such as test and production using directories rather than branches, which avoids the pain of merging environment-specific configuration. Favour trunk-based development for configuration repositories, with a single trunk and short-lived branches per environment that are merged back through a pull request. Finally, protect the trunk with branch protection rules and clear approval policies, so only reviewed changes reach your live environments.

How 8grams uses GitOps and ArgoCD

At 8grams, we run Kubernetes deployments the GitOps way, with ArgoCD keeping each cluster in sync with a Git repository that acts as the single source of truth. That gives our clients consistent environments, a full audit trail of every change, and fast, low-risk rollbacks, all from the same Git workflow their engineers already use.