GitOps Pipeline Workflow Designer

GitOps is built on four principles: (1) Declarative — the entire system is described declaratively in Git. (2) Versioned and Immutable — the desired state is stored in Git, providing a full audit trail and enabling rollback via revert. (3) Pulled Automatically — an agent (ArgoCD, Flux) continuously pulls from Git and reconciles the live cluster state. (4) Continuously Reconciled — a software agent detects and corrects drift between desired (Git) and actual (cluster) state. Unlike push-based CI/CD, GitOps agents pull changes rather than having CI pipelines push them, eliminating the need for cluster credentials in CI.

Choose ArgoCD if: you need a rich web UI for developers to monitor app health, you want an application-centric model (one Application CRD per app), or your team is less comfortable with pure YAML/CLI. Choose Flux if: you prefer composable, controller-per-resource architecture (GitRepository + HelmRelease + Kustomization are separate CRDs), need native multi-tenancy, or want tighter image automation (ImageUpdateAutomation writes tags back to Git). Both are CNCF graduated projects. ArgoCD has a larger community and better UI; Flux is more flexible and GitOps-toolkit native.

Mono-repo (all apps and config in one repo) is simpler to start with — one place to search, fewer permissions to manage, easy cross-service changes. It scales well to ~20-30 services. Multi-repo separates each app or team into its own repo — better for large organizations with isolated teams, different release cadences, or strict access control requirements. A common hybrid: per-app source repos for application code, plus a dedicated 'config repo' or 'fleet repo' for all Kubernetes manifests. The fleet repo is the GitOps source of truth regardless of where application code lives.

Drift occurs when someone makes a manual change to a running cluster (e.g., kubectl edit, Helm upgrade) that differs from what Git declares. GitOps agents detect drift by continuously comparing live cluster resources to the desired state in Git. ArgoCD shows drift in its UI and marks apps as 'OutOfSync'. With selfHeal: true (ArgoCD) or force: true (Flux), the agent automatically reverts manual changes back to the Git state — typically within seconds. This is the key safety property of GitOps: Git is always the authority. Drift remediation eliminates the 'snowflake cluster' problem.

App of Apps is a bootstrap pattern where a root ArgoCD Application points to a Git directory that contains other Application manifests. When ArgoCD syncs the root app, it discovers and creates child Applications automatically. This creates a self-managing hierarchy: root app → app definitions → deployed apps. It's useful for managing many apps across multiple clusters without manual registration. The alternative is ApplicationSets, which use generators (cluster, git, list, matrix) to template Applications dynamically. For Fleet CD patterns, use ApplicationSets with a cluster generator to deploy the same app across dozens of clusters.