While the use of Git as the version control system is not strictly required, it has become the default choice because of its ubiquity in modern devops workflows and its strong support for collaboration and change management, so its place in the name has stuck.
What is the CI/CD process?
A complete look at CI/CD is beyond the scope of this article—see the InfoWorld explainer on the subject—but we need to say a few words about CI/CD because it’s at the core of how GitOps works. The continuous integration half of CI/CD is enabled by version control repositories like Git: Developers can make constant small improvements to their codebase, rather than rolling out huge, monolithic new versions every few months or years. The continuous deployment piece is made possible by automated systems called pipelines that build, test, and deploy the new code to production.
Again, we keep talking about code here, and that usually summons up visions of executable code written in a programming language such as C or Java or JavaScript. But in GitOps, the “code” we’re managing is largely made up of configuration files. This isn’t just a minor detail — it’s at the heart of what GitOps does. These config files are, as we’ve said, the “single source of truth” describing what our system should look like. They are declarative rather than instructive. That means that instead of saying “start up ten servers,” the configuration file will simply say, “this system includes ten servers.”
