GitOps with ArgoCD — A Practical Guide to Declarative Deployments

The Deployment Problem Nobody Talks About Your CI pipeline builds the image. Then what? Someone runs kubectl apply . Or a Helm command buried in a deploy step. Or a script that SSHes into a bastion host. Three months later, nobody knows what's actually running in production — because the cluster state drifted from what's in Git. GitOps fixes this by making Git the single source of truth for your cluster state. ArgoCD is the most widely adopted GitOps operator for Kubernetes, and for good reason: it's declarative, it auto-syncs, and it shows you exactly where reality diverges from intent. This guide covers how to set it up properly — not the "hello world" version, but the version that survives real workloads. What GitOps Actually Means GitOps is a deployment pattern with four principles, formalized by the OpenGitOps project : Declarative — the entire desired system state is described declaratively (YAML, Helm charts, Kustomize overlays) Versioned and immutable — the desired state is sto