Three phrases keep popping up when talking about modern workflows and development and deployment techniques. We have continuous delivery to automate the complete lifecycle of applications from a commit to a Git repository, all the way until a release is deployable to production. Then we have GitOps to define the desired states of our environments and let the machines handle the converge the actual into the desired state. Finally, there is a lot of focus on different deployment strategies grouped under progressive delivery.

Since the rise of Kubernetes, GitOps workflows have become the standard way for teams to manage the state of large systems. GitOps is a way to perform application management and delivery, which at its core leverages a version control system to maintain the desired state of the system. Being able to describe the desired state using human readable text files, and allowing automation to handle deployments and updates based on those files, means less opportunity for human error and faster deployments.