CGOA study plan
CGOA · Give each week a clear focus.
8 weeks · About 6 hours per week
GitOps Terminology
Define in your own words the core GitOps vocabulary: desired state, declarative configuration, reconciliation, drift, convergence, and source of truth.
Distinguish push-based delivery from pull-based reconciliation and list at least three operational consequences of each.
Map the relationship between Git repositories, environment manifests, and cluster state using a hand-drawn or text-based diagram.
Write a one-page glossary of 15 GitOps terms with a concrete example for each, avoiding marketing language.
Your checkpoint
A 15-term personal glossary with one example per term, reviewed against your own diagram for consistency.
GitOps Principles
State the four GitOps principles (declarative, versioned and immutable, pulled automatically, continuously reconciled) and explain why each is necessary.
Analyze a failure scenario where one principle is violated and describe the observable symptoms.
Compare the principle of continuous reconciliation with event-driven CI pipelines and identify where each fits.
Draft a short checklist that a team could use to audit whether a workflow is genuinely GitOps.
Your checkpoint
A one-page audit checklist derived from the four principles, with a pass/fail question for each.
GitOps Principles
Explain how immutable versioning, rollback, and auditability interact in a GitOps operating model.
Describe the security implications of granting a cluster-side agent read access to Git and write access to the cluster.
Identify at least three anti-patterns that look like GitOps but are not, and justify each with a principle.
Write a 300-word explanation of why GitOps is an operating model rather than a specific tool.
Your checkpoint
A 300-word written explanation plus a table of three anti-patterns with the principle each violates.
GitOps Patterns
Compare the environment-per-branch, environment-per-directory, and environment-per-repository patterns on isolation, promotion, and review overhead.
Design a promotion flow from staging to production using one chosen pattern and describe the exact Git operations involved.
Explain how configuration drift is detected and corrected in a pull-based model, including what happens when Git and the cluster disagree.
Describe the role of sealed secrets or external secret stores in keeping declarative repositories safe.
Your checkpoint
A written promotion design for one application across three environments, including the Git operations and drift-handling steps.
GitOps Patterns
Explain multi-cluster and multi-tenant patterns, including how cluster-scoped versus namespace-scoped resources are managed.
Describe progressive delivery concepts (canary, blue-green) and how they interact with continuous reconciliation.
Analyze a rollback scenario and describe how reverting a Git commit propagates to the cluster.
Identify the trade-offs of a monorepo versus many repositories for GitOps at scale.
Your checkpoint
A decision record comparing monorepo and multi-repo layouts for a team of 30 engineers, with a recommendation and rationale.
Related Practices
Explain how infrastructure as code complements GitOps and where the two overlap or diverge.
Describe the relationship between CI, CD, and GitOps, and identify which responsibilities move to the cluster-side agent.
Explain policy as code and how admission control enforces organizational rules on reconciled state.
Compare observability requirements for GitOps with traditional deployment monitoring, including reconciliation health signals.
Your checkpoint
A one-page comparison table of CI/CD, IaC, policy as code, and observability, each mapped to a GitOps responsibility.
Tooling
Compare at least two pull-based GitOps tools on reconciliation model, multi-cluster support, and secret handling.
Describe how a GitOps operator reports sync status and health, and what metrics or events indicate a failed reconciliation.
Explain the role of manifest tooling such as Kustomize or Helm in producing declarative desired state.
Identify what to check first when a resource is stuck out of sync, using tool output rather than guesswork.
Your checkpoint
A tool comparison matrix of two GitOps tools across five criteria, with a short troubleshooting runbook.
GitOps Terminology & GitOps Principles
Re-derive the four GitOps principles from memory and explain each in two sentences without notes.
Review your glossary and audit checklist from weeks 1 and 2 and correct any inaccuracies.
Complete a timed practice set covering terminology and principles, then review every missed item.
Summarize the three concepts you found hardest and write a short explanation for each.
Your checkpoint
A corrected glossary and checklist plus a scored practice-set review log showing domain-by-domain accuracy.
Milestones
Week 2: You can state all four GitOps principles from memory and give one concrete example of a workflow that violates each.
Week 4: You can explain, without notes, how drift is detected and corrected in a pull-based model and name the Git operations in a staging-to-production promotion.
Week 6: You can distinguish CI, IaC, policy as code, and observability responsibilities in a GitOps workflow and score at least 80% on a mixed practice set covering domains 2, 3, and 4.
Week 8: You score at least 85% on a full-length timed practice exam, with no domain below 70%, and your glossary and checklist contain no factual errors.