MY ONE BLOGby Manishdai
Cloud & DevOps

What is GitOps?

Quick answer

A way of managing infrastructure and deployments where the desired system state is stored in Git and automatically applied by software agents.

GitOps, explained

In GitOps, configuration files in a Git repository describe exactly how applications and infrastructure should look. An automated agent continuously compares the live environment with the repository and corrects any differences. To change the system, engineers change the files and merge a pull request, rather than running commands by hand.

For example, to release a new version of a web service on Kubernetes, a developer updates the version number in a configuration file. After review and merge, the GitOps tool notices the change and rolls it out. If someone edits the cluster manually, the tool reverts it to match Git. This gives teams a complete audit history, easy rollbacks, and consistent environments. GitOps works best with declarative tools such as Kubernetes and infrastructure as code.

Related terms

Git

A free, open-source distributed version control system that tracks changes to code and lets many developers collaborate safely.

Infrastructure as Code

Managing and provisioning servers, networks, and cloud resources through machine-readable configuration files instead of manual setup.

Kubernetes

An open-source platform that automates deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications across clusters of machines.

Terraform

A widely used infrastructure as code tool that lets teams define cloud resources in configuration files and create them automatically.

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