Theory

Updated

October 30, 2026

Theory: Desired State Lives in Git; the Cluster Converges

GitOps’s four pillars: Git as source of truth, declarative desired state, pull-based agents, continuous reconciliation. Push-based CI (kubectl apply from a pipeline) is CIOps, not GitOps.

Invariants

  1. If it is not in Git, it is drift.
  2. The agent, not the human, writes to the cluster API.
  3. Preview environments are extra desired states (extra Git refs or folders).
Git desired  --pull-->  reconciler  --apply-->  cluster actual
                 compare + converge

What can break

  • Manual kubectl on a GitOps cluster (the next reconcile fights you).

How to read this chapter

Pain, pillars, benefits, push vs pull, env repos, trunk vs PRs, vs other *Ops, when.