GitOps
Using Git as the single source of truth for infrastructure and application configuration. Changes are made via pull requests and automatically reconciled by tools like ArgoCD or Flux.
What is GitOps?
Using Git as the single source of truth for infrastructure and application configuration. Changes are made via pull requests and automatically reconciled by tools like ArgoCD or Flux.
GitOps is a intermediate-level concept that sits in the DevOps & CI/CD area of system design. Engineers reach for it whenever they need to reason about real-world trade-offs in that space — not just for textbook correctness, but because real production systems at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google make these decisions every day.
If you want to go deeper than this definition — with diagrams, code, and a quiz to lock it in — work through the "GitOps" lesson linked below. It walks through the why, the mechanism, the trade-offs, and how the giants actually use it in production.
Learn GitOps in depth
Full interactive lesson with diagrams, code examples, real-world references, and a quiz.
Open the GitOps lessonRelated lessons
Lessons that touch on GitOps as part of a larger topic.
Configuration as Code
Managing application and infrastructure configuration in version-controlled files instead of manual settings
intermediate · devops cicd
Config Drift Prevention
Detecting and preventing configuration drift, when reality slowly diverges from your declared infrastructure
intermediate · kubernetes containers
Desired State Configuration
Defining what your infrastructure should look like and letting systems converge toward it automatically
intermediate · kubernetes containers
See also
Related glossary terms you might want to look up next.
CI/CD
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment: automating the process of testing and deploying code. Push code, tests run, and it ships to production automatically.
Infrastructure as Code
Managing servers, networks, and cloud resources through declarative configuration files instead of manual setup. Terraform, Pulumi, and CloudFormation are IaC tools.
Kubernetes
An orchestration platform that automates deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications. K8s is the operating system for your cloud.