Related Practices: CGOA practice questions

Related practices place GitOps in the wider landscape and make up 16% of the CGOA curriculum: configuration as code, infrastructure as code, DevOps and DevSecOps, and continuous integration and delivery. GitOps borrows from each of them, and questions often ask which practice a description belongs to.

Infrastructure as code, in the CNCF Cloud Native Glossary, is the practice of storing the definition of infrastructure as one or more files, instead of provisioning it manually through shell scripts or other tools. That makes infrastructure disposable and reproducible, lets it scale on demand in an automated and repeatable way, and gives a single source of truth for configuration that can be version-controlled. Configuration as code applies the same idea to application and system settings: they live in version-controlled files, so changes can be reviewed, tracked and rolled back. GitOps adds to both the requirement that an agent continuously reconciles the running system to those files.

DevOps, per the same glossary, is a methodology in which teams own the entire process from application development to production operations, and it requires a shift in culture and processes, not only tools. DevSecOps is a cultural merger of development, operations and security responsibilities. It extends DevOps with security without significantly disrupting developer and operations workflows; security policies should be enforced without becoming a blocker, and developers should get clear guidance on how to resolve issues. The glossary's motivating example is a process that releases software rapidly without considering security needs, which can weaken an organization's posture. In a GitOps workflow these checks naturally sit on the pull request and in the pipeline that validates manifests before they reach the state store.

Continuous integration is the practice of integrating code changes as regularly as possible, so conflicts and breakages surface early. Continuous delivery, as the CNCF glossary defines it, automatically deploys code changes into an acceptance environment; continuous deployment goes further and releases to production. GitOps does not replace these practices. CI still builds and tests, and the delivery step becomes a change to the desired state that an agent pulls, rather than a pipeline pushing into the cluster.

The CNCF glossary describes GitOps itself as a set of practices for managing applications and infrastructure, in which automated processes continuously compare the live system with the desired state in version control. It names the problem it targets: configuration drift is hard to detect and resolve without a source of truth, which can stretch outages. In return it offers transparency and traceability of changes, rollback and self-healing. That is the line between GitOps and plain infrastructure as code: IaC defines infrastructure in files, while GitOps also requires those files to be versioned, pulled and continuously reconciled.