GitOps: Best practices for the real world

This post defines GitOps, its four core principles (declarative code, Git versioning, automated pull requests, continuous reconciliation), and its advantages (single source of truth, easy rollback, enhanced security). It details the GitOps workflow, emphasizing declarative descriptions, Git as a control mechanism, and separation of configuration/deployment. The post addresses real-world complexities like cloud resource lifecycles (mutable vs. immutable), push-based vs. pull-based deployments, and managing multiple environments (dev, staging, prod) using branching strategies. A reference architecture for IBM Cloud is presented, differentiating CaaS (using Argo CD on OpenShift) and IaaS (using IBM Cloud Schematics with Terraform) layers.