GitOps: Declarative Delivery with Argo CD and Flux

The previous article built the container image and updated the manifest. The CI pipeline did its job. But who applies that manifest to the cluster? And what happens when someone runs kubectl edit at 2 AM and changes a replica count that your pipeline doesn't know about?

Push-based delivery has a blind spot: once the pipeline finishes, nothing watches the cluster. Drift accumulates silently. GitOps closes that gap by putting a controller inside the cluster that continuously pulls desired state from Git and reconciles it. No external system needs cluster credentials. Git becomes the single source of truth, and the controller becomes the enforcement mechanism.