Related Practices
The Related Practices domain tests how GitOps fits with adjacent disciplines: Infrastructure as Code, Configuration as Code, CI/CD, DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering. Questions often ask which practice adds continuous reconciliation and which does not.
How the practices relate
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): provisioning infrastructure through machine-readable definitions. IaC may be imperative or declarative and may use a one-shot apply. GitOps adds a versioned source of truth and a continuous pull-based reconciler for the managed system.
- Configuration as Code: managing configuration in versioned files. GitOps extends this by making the running system converge to those files, not merely generating them.
- CI/CD: CI builds and tests artifacts; CD delivers them. GitOps is a delivery pattern where an agent pulls desired state. A CI pipeline can still build and scan images, but it should not need cluster credentials to deploy.
- DevOps: a culture and set of practices for collaboration and fast feedback. GitOps is an operational pattern that supports DevOps goals such as auditability and reduced toil; it does not replace DevOps.
- SRE: reliability engineering with SLOs, error budgets, and toil reduction. GitOps supports repeatability and drift correction, but SLO management remains an SRE practice.
- Platform engineering: building internal platforms and self-service paths. GitOps is commonly the delivery mechanism for platform-managed workloads.
Worked example
A team uses Terraform to create a cloud VPC and an Argo CD Application to manage Kubernetes workloads. Terraform is IaC: it plans and applies infrastructure changes, and its state file is not continuously reconciled by a cluster agent. Argo CD is GitOps: it pulls the workload manifests and corrects drift. Calling the Terraform step GitOps is wrong because there is no automatic pull-and-reconcile loop for the VPC. The distinction is not 'code in Git' but 'agent continuously converges actual state to versioned desired state.'
Traps that cost marks
Equating IaC with GitOps because both use files. Saying GitOps replaces CI; CI still builds and tests. Saying GitOps is only for Kubernetes. Claiming a push-based CD pipeline is GitOps. Treating DevOps and GitOps as synonyms.