GitOps, Explained

An explainer, played back

What is GitOps?

Seven short chapters on the idea that your infrastructure can have a commit history. Press play, or click any point on the graph below to jump around.

Open

GitOps

What happens when your infrastructure gets a paper trail.

01 — Before

Someone SSHs in and just changes things

An engineer runs a command against a live server. It works. Nobody writes down what changed. Three weeks later, nobody remembers why staging and production have drifted apart.

YOU PROD SERVER ssh in kubectl apply patch.yaml hand-edit the config ⚠ no record of any of this
Three different people, three different fixes, none of them written down anywhere.

02 — The idea

Describe the destination, not the steps

You write what the system should look like — a YAML file, checked into Git — instead of a list of commands to get there. That file, and its history, becomes the single source of truth.

The change is proposed as a diff, reviewed like code, then merged.

03 — How it runs

An operator watches, and closes the gap

Software inside the cluster reads the repo, reads what's actually running, and applies only the difference. Nothing outside the cluster ever pushes into it — the cluster pulls from Git.

GIT REPO desired state CLUSTER live state OPERATOR reconciles on a loop reads desired state reads live state applies the diff
Read from Git, read from the cluster, write only the difference back into the cluster.

04 — When things drift

Manual changes don't survive

If someone edits production by hand, the next reconciliation pass notices the mismatch — and quietly overwrites it back to whatever Git says. Git wins, every time.

05 — When things break

Rolling back is a revert, not a fire drill

A bad deploy goes out. Someone runs git revert. The operator picks up that commit on its next pass and redeploys the last known-good state — no SSH, no manual patch.

last known-good bad deploy revert h7i8j9 restores redeployed
A revert is just another commit — it doesn't need special access to production to take effect.

06 — Recap

That's GitOps

00:00 / 01:03

Open — GitOps

Space to play/pause · ← → to change chapters · click the graph to jump · the speaker icon turns on spoken narration. Motion is skipped automatically if your system prefers reduced motion.