🚀 GitOps = Managing infrastructure and deployments using Git as the single source of truth.

📦 Git is not just for code anymore — it’s also for:

  • Deployment configs
  • System state (e.g., Kubernetes manifests)
  • Automation triggers
  • Monitoring and rollback logic

So instead of logging into a server to sudo vi nginx.conf, we:

  1. Edit the config in Git
  2. Commit and push
  3. A tool watches the repo and applies the changes automatically

🔁 Core GitOps Flow 

+---------+       +-----------+        +-----------+
|   You   | --->  |   Git     | --->   | Automation|
| (edit)  |       | (commit)  |        | (apply)   |
+---------+       +-----------+        +-----------+
  • You write desired state in Git (e.g., “This container should be running”)
  • Automation tools apply that state (e.g., Kubernetes controller, Ansible pull)
  • If someone changes the system outside of Git? The system rolls it back to the Git version

🎯 It’s declarative, versioned, auditable, and reproducible

🔧 Tools Often Used in GitOps

Tool

Role

Git

Version control system (source of truth)

FluxCD / ArgoCD

Watch Git repos and sync changes into Kubernetes

Ansible + Git

For non-K8s systems — Ansible pull from Git instead of push

Terraform + Git

Infrastructure as code (e.g., provision VMs, networks)

CI/CD tools (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins)

Automate the update/apply pipelines

🧠 Why It Matters (and Why You'd Use It)

  • Rollback becomes a git revert
  • Audit trail is already built in
  • Reproducibility — you can spin up identical infra on another machine/env
  • Collaboration — teammates don’t fight over state
  • Disaster recovery — config lives in Git, not just “on that one box we hope never dies”

🧰 Example: What GitOps Looks Like in Practice

You want a Podman container deployed with Nginx reverse proxy config:

Instead of: 

scp nginx.conf frodo:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
systemctl reload nginx

You:

  1. Commit nginx.conf to Git
  2. Push to main
  3. Your GitOps tool detects the change and applies it to Frodo (or Camelot or both)
  4. If it breaks, revert the commit and it auto-rolls back

🔁 When is it time for GitOps?

  • If you already build scripted, reproducible systems
  • If you care about making things portable and understandable
  • If you don’t want to be the only person who knows how to fix something

It’s not magic — it’s just good habits wrapped in automation.

Next steps will be for a GitOps starter pattern-- for a non-Kubernetes setup (like our Camelot/Frodo environment). It can be built around:

  • systemd units
  • cron jobs
  • Config templates
  • A Git repo you already own

We can even make it air-gapped–friendly.