Chapter 4: GitOps with Terraform + ArgoCD — A LLM Self-Hosting Product Infrastructure

Each chapter in this series has been a deliberate step toward removing friction from LLM infrastructure management. Chapter 2 introduced Infrastructure as Code by mapping Kubernetes resources directly to Terraform — functional, but painfully verbose. Chapter 3 resolved the abstraction problem by bringing in the Helm provider, collapsing 500 lines of HCL into 50 and allowing Terraform to reason about applications rather than individual resources. Both approaches, however, shared the same fundamental constraint: every change still required a human to run terraform apply . The cluster had no awareness of Git, drift went undetected until someone noticed, and scaling that model to larger teams or more frequent deploys would inevitably make manual execution a bottleneck. Chapter 4 closes that loop by introducing GitOps with ArgoCD — making the cluster itself responsible for continuously reconciling its state against Git, without anyone needing to trigger a command. The Four Principles of Git