CGOA case studies

CGOA · Put your knowledge to work in context.

The Certified GitOps Associate (CGOA) is a Linux Foundation certification that verifies a candidate's grasp of GitOps principles, terminology, and best practices for setting up a GitOps-managed software system. It is aimed at DevOps engineers and team members, platform and software engineers, CI/CD practitioners, and others who build internal developer platforms with GitOps built in. The CGOA case studies are 5 cases and about 5,232 words.

Argo CD with selfHeal Disabled: Drift, Sync Status, and Reconciliation Vocabulary

Northwind Retail runs 14 Kubernetes clusters (3 production, 4 staging, 7 edge) with Argo CD. Applications sync automatically, but the ApplicationSet sets syncPolicy.automated.selfHeal: false because, per the platform lead, "we don't want the controller fighting on-call during incidents." Last month an engineer patched a Deployment image with kubectl set image during a payment outage; the patch stayed live for nine days and no commit was ever made to match it.

754 words, about 4 min 2

Auditing Four Principles Against a "GitOps" Estate That Pushes from CI

Helio Health says it "does GitOps" for 60 microservices. GitHub holds Helm charts and values; a GitHub Actions workflow on merge to main runs helm upgrade --install against 5 clusters using a long-lived kubeconfig stored as a repository secret.

1,077 words, about 5 min 3

"Terraform in Git, Applied by Jenkins" - Is It GitOps?

Juniper Logistics has run Jenkins for six years. On every merge to main , Jenkins tests, builds images, runs terraform apply for cloud resources, then runs kubectl apply -f rendered/ against 9 clusters.

1,013 words, about 5 min 4

Environment Branches, a Prod Hotfix, and 30 Tenant Overlays

Fjord Analytics runs 3 clusters (dev, staging, prod) from one repo, platform-config , with long-lived branches dev , staging , prod ; promotion means merging dev→staging→prod. There are 220 workloads, each with a Kustomize overlay per environment.

1,132 words, about 6 min 5

Choosing Argo CD or Flux for 40 Clusters with Intermittent Edge Connectivity

Meridian Bank is choosing between Argo CD and Flux for 40 clusters (3 production, 12 non-production, 25 edge retail sites with connectivity that can drop for up to 6 hours) and roughly 600 applications. Two platform teams and 14 application teams must be isolated: an app team must not modify another team's resources, and ideally not read their secrets.

1,256 words, about 6 min