By DevOps Enginer – Cloud-Native Series · Updated for 2026

Quick answer: Traditional CI/CD pushes a deployment to your environment from a pipeline. GitOps pulls the desired state from Git using an operator running in (or managing) the environment, which continuously reconciles reality with Git. GitOps does not replace CI — most GitOps teams still use a CI pipeline to build, test, and publish an image, then let GitOps handle deployment. If you run Kubernetes across multiple services or clusters and care about drift, audit, and repeatable rollbacks, GitOps is usually the stronger deployment model.…