What are the core principles of GitOps?

Question

Accepted Answer

There are 4, often called the OpenGitOps principles. Declarative: the whole desired state of the system is expressed declaratively, so you describe what you want, not a sequence of imperative steps. Versioned and immutable: that desired state lives in git, so it is versioned, auditable, and immutable, and every change is a commit you can review and trace back to an author. Pulled automatically: software agents automatically pull the declared state from git, rather than a human running an apply. And continuously reconciled: those agents keep observing the actual state and work to make it match the declared state, correcting drift whenever the two diverge. Argo CD does that on a 3 minute sync loop by default, and Flux is similar, so drift typically gets healed within minutes rather than sitting there until someone notices. That fourth principle is what really separates GitOps from just storing manifests in git. The system is always converging on what git says, not only at the moment of a deploy. And the first two are what buy you the operational wins people care about, a full audit trail across every commit and a rollback that is one git revert away.

Answer

Which principle separates GitOps from simply keeping manifests in a repo?

Continuous reconciliation: an agent constantly drives the cluster toward the declared state and corrects drift. Just storing manifests in git without that loop is not GitOps.

Answer

Why does "immutable and versioned" matter operationally?

Every change is a reviewable, traceable commit, giving a full audit trail and making rollback a simple revert. You always know exactly what is deployed and who changed it.

What are the core principles of GitOps?

What are the core principles of GitOps?

The follow-ups they ask next

What the interviewer is listening for

What sinks the answer

If you genuinely do not know

Keep going with gitops

Knowing the answer is not the same as recalling it under pressure