What is GitOps and how does it differ from traditional CI/CD?

Traditional CI/CD: The pipeline has credentials and directly pushes deployments to environments (push-based).

GitOps: Git is the single source of truth for the desired state of your infrastructure and applications. An agent running in the cluster (like ArgoCD or Flux) continuously reconciles the actual state with the desired state in Git (pull-based).

Benefits of GitOps: Drift detection, audit trail in Git history, easy rollback (git revert), no outbound credentials needed in CI.