What is GitOps, and how does it differ from traditional CI/CD?

GitOps is a deployment model where Git is the single source of truth for the desired state of infrastructure and applications, and an automated controller continuously reconciles the live environment to match Git.

• Pull-based — a controller (Argo CD, Flux) inside the cluster pulls from Git. Traditional CI/CD is push-based — pipelines push changes from outside.

• Declarative — Git holds Kubernetes manifests, Helm charts, or Kustomize overlays describing the desired state.

• Continuous reconciliation — controller detects drift between Git and cluster and corrects it automatically.

vs traditional CI/CD:

• Traditional: pipeline runs kubectl apply from CI runner; needs cluster credentials in CI.

• GitOps: cluster pulls from Git; no inbound credentials, easier auditing, automatic drift remediation, faster rollback (just revert the Git commit).

Tools: Argo CD, FluxCD, Jenkins X, Codefresh.