What is GitOps and what core principles does it define?

GitOps is an operational framework that applies DevOps practices — version control, collaboration, compliance, and CI/CD automation — to infrastructure and application delivery. The term was coined by Alexis Richardson of Weaveworks in 2017. The central idea is that Git acts as both the mechanism for change (pull requests) and the immutable audit log (commit history) for every system state transition.

The OpenGitOps working group (CNCF) formalised four core principles:

• Declarative: The entire desired system state is expressed declaratively — you describe what should exist, not the sequence of steps to create it. Kubernetes manifests, Helm values files, and Kustomize overlays all qualify.
• Versioned and Immutable: Desired state is stored in a VCS (Git) that enforces immutability and retains full history. Every change is a commit — reviewable, reversible, and attributable to a specific author.
• Pulled Automatically: Software agents — not humans or CI pipelines — pull desired state from Git and apply it to the target environment. This inverts the traditional push model and keeps cluster credentials inside the cluster, not in external CI systems.
• Continuously Reconciled: Agents continuously compare actual cluster state against the Git-declared desired state. When drift is detected they either alert operators or automatically self-heal, converging the system back to what Git specifies.

These four principles create a closed-loop automation system where every deployment, rollback, or configuration change flows through a Git commit and review cycle.

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