What Is GitOps? Core Principles & Benefits

Traditional CI/CD pipelines typically rely on long-lived, high-privilege credentials to push updates into Kubernetes clusters. This creates a single point of failure: if the pipeline is compromised, an attacker gains broad access across every environment it touches. At scale, this is an unacceptable security posture.

A pull-based model eliminates that exposure. Instead of a centralized system pushing changes, an in-cluster agent continuously pulls the desired state from a Git repository. Credentials stay inside the cluster, and the Kubernetes API never needs to be publicly reachable. This shift changes the threat model entirely—compromise of the central pipeline no longer translates to compromise of the fleet.

Plural adopts this agent-based architecture as a foundational security principle. By keeping all privileges local to each cluster and removing the need for centralized secrets, Plural enables teams to manage large fleets with far lower operational and security risk.

Key takeaways:

• Treat infrastructure like application code: Adopt a Git-centric workflow where all infrastructure and application configurations are version-controlled and managed through pull requests. This creates a transparent, auditable history for every change and makes rollbacks straightforward.
• Prioritize a pull-based architecture for security: Use an in-cluster agent to pull configurations from Git rather than having an external system push them. This model is inherently more secure because cluster credentials never leave the cluster boundary, reducing the attack surface and enabling management of private clusters.
• Use a centralized platform to manage fleets: As you scale beyond a single cluster, a centralized control plane is essential for managing configuration drift, enforcing consistent RBAC policies, and maintaining visibility. Plural provides this unified management layer to ensure your entire fleet remains synchronized and secure.

What Is GitOps?

GitOps is an operational model that applies established software engineering practices (version control, code review, and automated workflows) to infrastructure and application delivery. In a GitOps workflow, Git becomes the authoritative source of truth for everything that defines your environment. Application manifests, infrastructure configurations, and deployment policies all live in a versioned repository, giving teams the same auditability and change discipline they use for application code.

By defining infrastructure declaratively and managing it through Git workflows, GitOps brings repeatability, consistency, and automation to Kubernetes operations. Every modification to the system is captured as a pull request, enabling peer review, automated validation, and a complete historical record. Modern Kubernetes deployment tooling is built around this model, where clusters continuously reconcile themselves to the state declared in Git.

Core Principles of GitOps

GitOps practices center around a few key principles that enforce consistency and reduce operational drift:

1. Declarative configuration
   The desired state of the entire system is expressed as code. Instead of scripting imperative actions, you specify what the system should look like, and tooling ensures it becomes—and stays—so.
2. Git as the single source of truth
   Git stores every environment definition and policy. If a configuration is in Git, it is considered canonical. All changes go through pull requests, creating a clear audit trail and enabling automated checks before anything reaches production.
3. Automated reconciliation
   In-cluster agents (such as Argo CD or Flux) continuously compare the live cluster state against what’s defined in Git. When they detect drift—whether caused by manual changes, failures, or external interference—they automatically correct it to bring the environment back to the declared configuration.

This feedback loop turns clusters into self-healing systems that always converge to the desired state.

GitOps vs. DevOps and CI/CD

GitOps doesn’t replace DevOps; it operationalizes DevOps principles with a more concrete, prescriptive workflow. DevOps focuses on cultural and process improvements—collaboration, automation, and shared responsibility. GitOps provides the implementation pattern that brings those ideas to Kubernetes infrastructure.

Similarly, GitOps refines traditional CI/CD pipelines:

• CI (Continuous Integration) remains unchanged: build, test, and validate code.
• CD (Continuous Delivery) shifts from a push-based model to a pull-based model.

In a traditional pipeline, a central system pushes updates into a cluster using stored credentials. In GitOps, clusters pull updates from Git. An operator running inside the cluster fetches the desired state, applies it, and automatically corrects any drift. This pull-based approach improves security, reduces dependency on centralized tooling, and provides deterministic, auditable deployments.

Plural builds on this architecture, using GitOps as a foundational pattern to manage fleets of clusters securely and consistently.

How GitOps Works

GitOps provides a structured, automated model for managing infrastructure and applications by treating everything as version-controlled configuration. It applies the same discipline used in software development—versioning, review, automated validation—to operational workflows. By driving all changes through Git and allowing clusters to self-manage against that declared state, teams gain predictable, repeatable, and observable operations.

The entire workflow is inherently auditable. Every modification is a commit, complete with authorship, timestamps, and rationale. When a deployment introduces an issue, you can trace it back to a specific commit and roll it back instantly. Plural builds on this pattern with a GitOps-based, drift-aware deployment engine that continuously synchronizes Kubernetes manifests into managed clusters.

Use Git as the Single Source of Truth

In GitOps, the Git repository defines the desired state for all infrastructure and applications. It contains version-controlled declarative configuration for clusters, workloads, and related policies. Instead of inspecting a live system to determine its configuration, you consult the repository’s main branch. This ensures that the intended state is always explicit and reviewable, and it prevents configuration drift by making Git—not the cluster—the authoritative reference.

Follow the GitOps Workflow Cycle

Every operational change begins with a commit. A developer proposes an update through a pull request, enabling peer review, automated checks, and policy enforcement before changes reach production. After the pull request is merged, an in-cluster GitOps operator detects the update, pulls the new state, and applies it.

The cluster reconciles itself to whatever is declared in Git. No one needs to push updates into the environment, and no central system requires credentials to your clusters. The operator continuously ensures that the live system matches the repository, closing the feedback loop between declared and actual state.

Manage Configuration Declaratively

GitOps depends on declarative configuration—a specification of what the system should look like, not the steps to get there. In Kubernetes, this typically takes the form of YAML manifests describing deployments, services, policies, and infrastructure dependencies.

The GitOps operator continuously compares the cluster’s actual state to the desired state stored in Git. If someone applies an out-of-band change or if the system drifts due to failure, the operator automatically restores compliance by re-applying the declarative configuration. This enforces reproducibility and prevents manual mutations from accumulating over time.

What Are the Key Components of GitOps?

GitOps is a framework composed of several interconnected components that collectively enforce versioning, automation, and reproducibility across infrastructure and application delivery. Rather than relying on ad hoc scripts or manual configuration, GitOps uses Git as the authoritative source of truth and drives all operational changes through repeatable workflows. The core building blocks include Infrastructure as Code (IaC), pull request–based change management, automated CI/CD pipelines, and in-cluster GitOps operators that reconcile desired and actual state. Together, these components create a predictable, auditable system where Kubernetes environments can be managed with confidence and consistency. Plural builds directly on this model to provide secure, scalable fleet management.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

IaC is the foundation of any GitOps implementation. All infrastructure definitions—from cloud networks and compute resources to Kubernetes clusters and application manifests—are expressed as code and checked into Git. This ensures environments are reproducible and that change history is fully traceable. Declarative IaC tools like Terraform allow teams to define desired state in code rather than mutating live infrastructure manually.

Plural extends this capability through Plural Stacks, which offers a Kubernetes-native, API-driven layer for orchestrating Terraform within a GitOps workflow. This reduces the operational overhead of managing Terraform at scale while keeping it aligned with the broader GitOps model.

Pull Request–Based Workflows

GitOps requires that every modification to the system's desired state flow through a pull request. Whether updating an application manifest or adjusting Terraform configurations, engineers propose changes via a PR rather than applying them directly to a cluster or cloud console. This enforces peer review, policy checks, and automated validation before any change is merged.

The result is a complete, reviewable audit trail of how the system evolves over time—what changed, who changed it, and why. In large teams or multi-cluster environments, this workflow is essential for maintaining operational safety and consistency.

Automated CI/CD Pipelines

CI/CD pipelines validate and package changes before they reach Git. The CI stage handles testing, linting, security scanning, and building artifacts such as container images. When a pull request is approved and merged, CD takes over—but in a GitOps model, CD does not push updates into the cluster.

Instead, it updates the declarative configuration in the repository—for example, by bumping an image tag in a Kubernetes manifest. That Git commit becomes the signal to the downstream GitOps operator that desired state has changed. This preserves the principle that Git, not the CI/CD system, defines what should run in production.

GitOps Operators and Controllers

GitOps operators are the agents that make GitOps work in practice. Running inside each Kubernetes cluster, they continuously reconcile cluster state with the configuration defined in Git. If they detect drift—caused by manual changes, partial failures, or external interference—they automatically restore the declared configuration.

This closed-loop reconciliation is what gives GitOps its self-healing properties. Operators ensure that clusters converge to the desired state and stay there.

Plural CD builds on this architecture with a secure, agent-based pull model. A lightweight in-cluster agent syncs manifests from Git without exposing the Kubernetes API or distributing elevated credentials across systems. This design enables consistent, secure management of entire fleet environments while minimizing blast radius and operational risk.

Why Adopt GitOps? The Key Benefits

GitOps brings the discipline of software engineering to infrastructure and application operations. By defining everything as code and funneling all changes through Git, teams gain a predictable, auditable, and automated operational model. This shift replaces ad-hoc scripts and manual cluster mutations with version-controlled workflows, enabling safer, more consistent deployments across Kubernetes environments. For organizations running complex or large-scale clusters, GitOps meaningfully improves stability, security, and team velocity while reinforcing a collaborative, review-driven culture.

Enhance Collaboration and Transparency

GitOps consolidates all configuration into a shared Git repository, giving developers, operators, and platform engineers a common workflow. Every change is proposed through a pull request rather than via manual commands or ticket-driven processes. This enables peer review, automated validation, and clear approval paths before changes reach production.

Because all history lives in Git, the entire system’s evolution is transparently recorded—what changed, who approved it, and why. This auditability builds shared ownership across teams and eliminates ambiguity around configuration provenance.

Accelerate Deployment Cycles

GitOps automates the entire path from commit to production. Once a pull request is merged, CI validates artifacts and updates manifests, and the GitOps operator syncs the change into clusters. Removing manual handoffs reduces operational friction and human error, allowing teams to ship smaller, more frequent updates with greater confidence.

Rollback becomes trivial: revert a commit and the system automatically converges to the previous known-good state. This safety net enables faster iteration without sacrificing reliability.

Improve Security and Compliance

GitOps strengthens security by channeling all operational changes through Git workflows rather than granting direct cluster access. Branch protections, code owners, and required approvals enforce authorization policies at the repository level. Only changes that pass review and automated checks can influence production.

Every modification is logged as an immutable Git commit, supporting compliance audits and incident investigations. When paired with Plural, teams can extend this model to manage Kubernetes RBAC and policy configurations as code, ensuring consistent access controls across an entire fleet.

Strengthen Disaster Recovery Capabilities

Because Git holds the complete declarative definition of your system, it doubles as a recovery blueprint. If a cluster fails or must be rebuilt, a GitOps operator can point to the repository and recreate workloads, configurations, and policies automatically.

This dramatically reduces Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and makes disaster recovery both predictable and testable. Instead of reconstructing environments manually or relying on incomplete snapshots, you restore your system deterministically from versioned configuration.

How Does GitOps Manage Kubernetes Deployments?

GitOps aligns naturally with Kubernetes because both rely on declarative configuration and continuous reconciliation. Rather than issuing imperative commands like kubectl apply or manually tuning cluster resources, teams define the desired state of workloads, policies, and configurations in Git. Kubernetes acts to maintain that state, and GitOps extends this model by making the Git repository the authoritative source of truth. Every deployment manifest and configuration file is versioned, reviewed, and auditable, creating a predictable and repeatable deployment workflow for even the most complex environments.

Use Kubernetes-Native GitOps Tools

GitOps depends on in-cluster operators—such as Argo CD, Flux, or Plural’s agent—that continuously monitor a Git repository for updates. These operators use the same reconciliation pattern that powers Kubernetes controllers: observe actual state, compare it against desired state, and take corrective action. Because this model aligns directly with Kubernetes’ native control-plane behavior, GitOps integrates cleanly without introducing external orchestration layers or long-lived credentials.

Synchronize Your Kubernetes Manifests

At the heart of the model is continuous synchronization. A GitOps operator constantly evaluates the live cluster against the manifests stored in Git. When differences appear—whether caused by manual kubectl changes, partial failures, or misconfigurations—the operator automatically corrects them by reapplying the declarative state from the repository.

This self-healing behavior prevents configuration drift and ensures deployments remain consistent across environments. Developers can still experiment locally, but production environments always converge back to what is explicitly defined and reviewed in Git.

Manage Kubernetes Fleets at Scale

While GitOps is straightforward in a single-cluster environment, fleet-level operations introduce new challenges—ensuring consistency across clusters, preventing drift, rolling out changes gradually, and managing cluster-specific overrides. Without dedicated tooling, these problems scale linearly with the number of clusters.

Plural addresses this complexity with a unified, GitOps-based continuous deployment platform built for fleet management. Its in-cluster, drift-detecting agent handles synchronization across many clusters, ensuring each one adheres to its declared configuration without exposing the Kubernetes API or distributing broad credentials. This provides a secure, consistent, and scalable workflow for managing applications and infrastructure across heterogeneous, multi-cloud, or edge environments.

What Tools and Technologies Power GitOps?

GitOps is a workflow powered by a coordinated set of technologies rather than a single tool. Its ecosystem automates the continuous alignment between your declarative state in Git and the actual state of your Kubernetes environments. The core toolchain centers around three pillars: version control systems that define and track desired state, reconciliation engines that enforce that state, and observability systems that confirm clusters remain healthy and compliant. Together, these components deliver a reliable, secure, and scalable deployment model.

Git Repositories for Version Control

At the heart of GitOps is a Git repository containing all declarative definitions for infrastructure and applications. Every change is expressed as code and introduced through a commit, creating a complete, chronological history of how your system evolves. Pull request workflows add peer review, automated validation, and clear authorization. Because Git serves as the single source of truth, rollbacks are simple: revert a commit and the GitOps operator automatically restores the previous state. This versioned, auditable model underpins the consistency and reproducibility of GitOps-driven environments.

GitOps Operators like Argo CD and Flux

GitOps operators are the automation layer that enforces desired state. Running inside Kubernetes, they continuously compare the live environment with the manifests stored in Git. When drift emerges—due to manual mutations, failures, or new commits—they reconcile the cluster back to the declared configuration.

Argo CD and Flux are the most widely adopted open source operators. They provide robust reconciliation loops, multi-application management, and integration with standard CI workflows. Plural CD extends this model with a secure, agent-based architecture tailored for multi-cluster and fleet environments. By using in-cluster agents and a pull-based synchronization model, Plural eliminates the need for centralized credentials or direct network access to clusters, improving both scalability and security.

Monitoring and Observability Platforms

Reconciliation ensures clusters converge to the state defined in Git, but observability ensures that the live system is functioning correctly. Logging, metrics, and tracing platforms provide the real-time feedback required to validate deployments and detect issues early. They also help confirm that the actual system behavior matches the intent expressed in your declarative configuration.

In large-scale or multi-cluster environments, unified visibility becomes critical. Plural delivers this through its embedded Kubernetes dashboard, offering an aggregated view of workloads, cluster health, and application performance across your fleet. This single-pane-of-glass approach simplifies troubleshooting and ensures teams can quickly identify and respond to configuration drift or operational anomalies.

Anticipate Common GitOps Implementation Challenges

While GitOps delivers a disciplined, automated model for Kubernetes operations, it also introduces new operational patterns that require thoughtful planning. Teams must address challenges around configuration drift, secret management, repository design, and multi-cluster scalability to fully realize the advantages of a GitOps workflow. Anticipating these issues early helps ensure a smooth adoption and avoids brittle or ad-hoc implementations.

Reconcile Configuration Drift

Configuration drift arises when the live cluster deviates from the declarative state in Git, often because of manual kubectl changes, out-of-band automation, or partial system failures. Drift undermines consistency and can lead to unpredictable behavior or outages. A mature GitOps approach requires continuous reconciliation that detects and corrects divergence automatically.

Plural CD uses a drift-detecting, pull-based synchronization engine that continuously aligns clusters with their declarative manifests. This ensures Git remains the authoritative source of truth and prevents unreviewed mutations from creeping into production environments.

Simplify Secret Management

Secrets pose one of the trickiest challenges in GitOps because sensitive data cannot be stored in plain text within Git. GitOps workflows typically rely on encryption tools such as HashiCorp Vault, Sealed Secrets, or external secret operators that allow teams to commit encrypted artifacts while keeping decryption keys inside the cluster.

Plural’s configuration system integrates with these patterns, enabling teams to securely parameterize deployments without exposing credentials. Secrets remain managed by in-cluster controllers, ensuring they flow cleanly through the GitOps pipeline without compromising security.

Organize Your Repository Structure

Repository layout directly impacts the maintainability and scalability of a GitOps workflow. Poorly structured repositories make it difficult to reason about environment boundaries, shared components, or application-specific configuration.

Common patterns include:

• Monorepos with environment-specific directories
• Repositories per application with overlays for dev, staging, and production
• Multi-repo strategies aligned with team or service boundaries

Plural supports flexible sourcing, allowing services to pull configuration from any directory in a repository. This gives teams the freedom to adopt structures that best match their workflows while keeping deployments consistent and reviewable.

Scale Across Multiple Environments

Scaling GitOps beyond a single cluster introduces new coordination challenges. Keeping dozens or hundreds of clusters in sync, promoting changes across environments, and enforcing consistent security policies all require centralized orchestration.

Plural’s agent-based architecture is designed for this multi-cluster reality. Its control plane enables you to manage heterogeneous fleets across clouds or on-prem datacenters, while Global Services provide a mechanism to apply shared configurations—such as RBAC policies or common workloads—across your entire fleet automatically. This ensures consistency at scale without sacrificing the security benefits of a pull-based model.

How to Choose the Right GitOps Deployment Pattern

Choosing an appropriate deployment pattern is foundational to a successful GitOps rollout, particularly when operating Kubernetes clusters at scale. The architecture you select affects security boundaries, operational overhead, and how easily your platform can grow. The central decision is whether to adopt a push-based or pull-based model—two fundamentally different approaches for propagating changes from Git into clusters. Understanding their trade-offs helps ensure your implementation aligns with your organization’s security posture, governance requirements, and scalability goals.

Compare Push-Based vs. Pull-Based Models

A push-based model relies on external systems—most commonly the CI/CD pipeline—to push configuration changes directly into clusters. While this pattern may align with traditional automation workflows, it introduces significant risks:

• The pipeline must store and manage high-privilege credentials for each target cluster.
• A compromise of the CI system exposes all environments it deploys to.
• Network paths to Kubernetes API servers must be opened, increasing attack surface.

For multi-cluster environments, these risks compound. Each new cluster requires additional credentials and network access, expanding operational complexity and reducing security isolation.

A pull-based model, by contrast, uses an in-cluster operator (e.g., Argo CD or Flux) to monitor the Git repository. The operator detects changes, pulls updated manifests, and reconciles the live state accordingly. This approach is inherently more secure:

• Credentials never leave the cluster.
• No external system needs direct access to the Kubernetes API.
• Workload clusters can remain fully private, with no inbound connectivity.

For GitOps implementations that prioritize security and scale, the pull-based model is the architectural default.

Secure Your Fleet with an Agent-Based Architecture

Pull-based models naturally evolve into agent-based architectures, which are particularly well-suited for multi-cluster fleet management. In this design, each cluster runs a lightweight agent responsible for pulling configuration and executing operations locally. Communication flows only over egress, keeping clusters isolated behind private networks.

Plural CD is built on this agent-based, pull-driven architecture. The Plural agent:

• Uses local credentials within each cluster, eliminating centralized key stores.
• Avoids exposing Kubernetes APIs or requiring inbound connectivity.
• Reduces blast radius—compromising one cluster does not compromise the fleet.
• Simplifies compliance by enforcing strong network and credential isolation.

This security posture is essential for enterprises managing clusters across cloud providers, regions, or on-prem environments.

Define Your Multi-Cluster Management Strategy

Scaling GitOps across multiple clusters introduces coordination challenges: ensuring consistency, avoiding drift, and managing environment-specific variations. A sound multi-cluster strategy includes:

• Standardized repository layouts to make environment boundaries explicit.
• Templating systems (Helm, Kustomize, or Plural’s service abstractions) to handle per-environment customization.
• Automated reconciliation to prevent divergence between declared and actual state.

A centralized orchestration layer significantly reduces this complexity. Plural’s management platform provides:

• A unified control plane for multi-cluster GitOps workflows.
• Built-in drift detection and automatic remediation.
• API-driven orchestration for IaC and application deployments.
• Global Services for enforcing shared configuration—such as RBAC policies—across the entire fleet.

This combination lets platform teams maintain strong governance while enabling application teams to operate independently within safe, consistent guardrails.

What Strategies Help Overcome GitOps Challenges?

Adopting GitOps provides a robust framework for managing Kubernetes, but scaling it introduces operational hurdles. As your environment grows from a single cluster to a fleet, challenges like configuration drift, decentralized management, and security enforcement become more pronounced. Without the right strategies and tools, these issues can undermine the efficiency and reliability that GitOps promises. Addressing these challenges requires a systematic approach focused on automation, centralization, and security. By implementing targeted solutions, your team can maintain control over a complex infrastructure, ensuring that your deployments remain consistent, secure, and manageable at any scale.

Automate Drift Detection and Correction

Configuration drift occurs when the live state of a cluster diverges from the desired state defined in your Git repository. This can happen due to manual kubectl commands, out-of-band changes, or failed deployments. Over time, this drift erodes the reliability of your single source of truth and complicates troubleshooting. The key to managing this is to implement a system that continuously monitors for and corrects drift.

Plural’s GitOps-based continuous deployment is built to solve this problem. The Plural agent, installed on each workload cluster, constantly polls the control plane to compare its current state against the configuration in Git. If any drift is detected, the agent automatically applies the necessary changes to bring the cluster back into its desired state, ensuring consistency across your entire fleet without manual intervention.

Centralize Management for Large-Scale Deployments

Managing dozens or hundreds of clusters with separate GitOps pipelines for each is not a scalable solution. This decentralized approach leads to configuration inconsistencies, duplicated effort, and a lack of visibility across your infrastructure. To effectively manage Kubernetes fleets, you need a centralized control plane that provides a single pane of glass for all your clusters. This allows you to apply configurations, enforce policies, and monitor health from one place.

Plural provides this unified cloud orchestrator through its control plane and agent architecture. You can manage your entire fleet from a single interface, deploying applications and configurations consistently across different environments. This model simplifies operations, reduces the risk of human error, and gives platform teams the visibility needed to manage large-scale deployments efficiently while maintaining a secure, egress-only communication pattern from managed clusters.

Implement Security Best Practices and RBAC

Integrating security into your GitOps workflow is critical, especially when managing access across multiple clusters. Defining and enforcing consistent Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) policies can be complex, and improper configuration can expose your clusters to significant risk. A sound strategy involves using your identity provider (IdP) as the source of truth for user and group permissions and applying those roles consistently across the fleet.

Plural simplifies this by integrating its embedded Kubernetes dashboard with your OIDC provider. It uses Kubernetes Impersonation to map your console identity to cluster roles, creating an effective SSO experience. You can define RBAC policies that grant permissions to users or groups—like sre@your.company.com or the sre group—and use Plural CD to sync these policies globally. This ensures that access controls are managed declaratively and enforced uniformly everywhere.

How to Get Started with GitOps

Transitioning to GitOps involves more than installing new tools; it requires a shift in how your team manages infrastructure. The process is methodical, starting with cultural alignment before moving to technical implementation. By breaking down the adoption into manageable stages—preparing your team, building a pipeline, and following best practices—you can ensure a smooth rollout. This approach builds a solid foundation for scaling your GitOps practices across the organization.

Prepare Your Team and Infrastructure

GitOps is a cultural shift that applies software development practices to infrastructure management. Before writing any code, your team must commit to this new workflow, where all changes and approvals happen within Git. The first technical step is establishing your Git repository as the single source of truth for your system's desired state. You'll also need a target environment, typically a Kubernetes cluster, ready to be managed. This preparation ensures everyone understands the process and that the foundational pieces are in place before you begin automating your infrastructure.

Set Up Your First GitOps Pipeline

With your foundation ready, you can build the pipeline. The workflow begins when a developer opens a pull request with a configuration change. After review and approval, the PR is merged, triggering your CI pipeline to build any necessary artifacts and update your Kubernetes manifests. A GitOps operator in your cluster detects the change in the Git repository and automatically pulls the new manifests to synchronize the cluster's state. Plural CD streamlines this entire process, providing a scalable, agent-based mechanism to sync your manifests and detect drift across your entire fleet.

Adopt Best Practices for a Successful Rollout

For a successful transition, treat GitOps as a disciplined process. The most important rule is to eliminate manual changes to your production environment; all modifications must go through the Git workflow. This maintains a single source of truth and an auditable history. Start with a single, non-critical application to prove the workflow and build team confidence. As you expand, establish clear conventions for your repository structure and pull request processes. Automating the deployment pipeline reduces human error and ensures that what’s in Git is always what’s running in production.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Isn't GitOps just another name for CI/CD with Infrastructure as Code? While they are related, there's a key distinction. Traditional CI/CD pipelines push changes to your infrastructure. GitOps, on the other hand, uses a pull model. An agent running inside your cluster continuously compares the cluster's live state to the desired state defined in Git. If it detects any difference, it automatically pulls the correct configuration and applies it. This creates a self-healing system that actively prevents configuration drift, which is a step beyond what most CI/CD pipelines do on their own.

How should we manage secrets like API keys in a GitOps workflow? Storing secrets in plain text in Git is a major security risk. The best practice is to store encrypted secrets in your repository and decrypt them only within the cluster. Tools like Sealed Secrets or HashiCorp Vault are commonly used for this. You commit an encrypted version of your secret to Git, and a controller running in your cluster decrypts it at runtime. This keeps your sensitive data secure while still allowing you to manage it through a version-controlled Git workflow.

How does this approach scale when managing a large fleet of Kubernetes clusters? Managing GitOps across many clusters introduces challenges like maintaining consistency and avoiding configuration drift. A centralized management platform is essential for this. Plural was designed specifically for fleet management, using a secure, agent-based architecture. A lightweight agent on each cluster pulls its configuration from a central control plane, ensuring you can enforce standards, apply global configurations like RBAC policies, and manage deployments consistently across any number of clusters without complex networking or credential management.

What happens if I need to make an urgent change directly in a cluster? The core principle of GitOps is to avoid manual changes, but emergencies happen. In these "break-glass" situations, you might need to apply a hotfix directly. However, the GitOps operator will see this manual change as drift and revert it. The proper long-term fix is to immediately commit the change to your Git repository to make it the new source of truth. For troubleshooting that doesn't require changes, you can use a secure read-only tool, like Plural's embedded Kubernetes dashboard, to inspect cluster resources without violating the GitOps workflow.

How do we start implementing GitOps without disrupting our current operations? The best approach is to start small and demonstrate value. Choose a single, non-critical application or service to manage with a GitOps workflow. This allows your team to learn the process, build confidence, and refine your repository structure and pull request standards in a low-risk environment. Once you've proven the model and established clear best practices, you can gradually migrate more services and environments over to the new workflow.