GitOps is a modern framework for cloud-native application deployment, combining DevOps practices such as Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Continuous Delivery (CD) with Git-based workflows. By emphasizing the separation of CI and CD, GitOps uses CD tools to pull declarative state definitions and artifacts directly from Git, ensuring immutable infrastructure, strict versioning, and consistent declarative workflows. Leveraging Kubernetes' control loop mechanisms, GitOps synchronizes deployed applications with a configuration repository, improving efficiency and reliability while enabling better modularity and control in application deployment processes. Teams have experienced significant advantages over traditional pipelines, including streamlined deployments, reduced manual intervention, and improved delivery practices.
GitOps was adopted to address the limitations of traditional CI/CD approaches, which often lack auditability, reproducibility, and the ability to leverage Kubernetes' full potential. By enforcing immutable infrastructure, GitOps ensures that any unauthorized changes are automatically reverted, maintaining alignment with the Git configuration. This allows us to create scalable, flexible architectures tailored to customer needs, such as managing fleet clusters for GitOps at scale or enabling multi-tenancy on shared clusters to optimize costs. The approach is particularly valuable for disaster recovery scenarios, where GitOps significantly reduces recovery time from days or weeks to minutes or hours, depending on infrastructure size of the customer.
While GitOps integrates seamlessly into our workflows, its successful adoption requires high team maturity and expertise. While the initial setup is straightforward, scaling GitOps effectively requires internal tools such as internal developer platforms, catalogs, and robust delivery processes to keep systems up to date. Despite these challenges, GitOps has proven to be a powerful addition to our tool stack, offering clearer workflows, improved disaster recovery, and a reliable foundation for managing cloud-native deployments.