GitOps with ArgoCD

GitOps is an operational framework that uses Git as the single source of truth for declarative infrastructure and applications. ArgoCD is the most popular GitOps tool for Kubernetes. This lesson covers GitOps principles, ArgoCD architecture, Application CRDs, sync strategies, and multi-cluster management.

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GitOps Principles

Principle	Description
Declarative	The entire system is described declaratively in Git
Versioned and immutable	Git provides an audit trail of every change
Pulled automatically	Agents pull desired state from Git, not pushed by CI
Continuously reconciled	Drift is detected and corrected automatically

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                      GitOps Workflow                        │
│                                                             │
│  Developer ──▶ Git Commit ──▶ Git Repo ──▶ ArgoCD ──▶ K8s │
│                                   ▲                   │    │
│                                   │                   │    │
│                                   └── Drift detected ─┘    │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

GitOps vs Traditional CI/CD