This guide was written by Michael Zion , CEO at MeteorOps, and first published on the MeteorOps blog .

Bottom line

GitOps is a way of running deployments where the desired state of your systems lives in Git, and an agent inside your environment continuously pulls that state and makes reality match it. The real benefits are concrete: every production change is a reviewed commit, rollback is a git revert , manual drift gets corrected automatically, your CI system no longer needs admin credentials to your clusters, and a lost cluster can be rebuilt from a repository.

The real costs are just as concrete. You have to solve secrets, environment promotion and repository layout yourself; tools like the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) will fight your sync controller until you configure around them; and debugging a failed sync adds a layer between a developer and their running pod. GitOps pays off for teams running several services on Kubernetes across more than one environment.…