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Day One: Understanding GitOps

Your platform team set up Flux and now deployments work differently. You merge your changes to main, CI builds a semantically versioned OCI artifact and pushes it to your company's artifact registry, and a controller inside the cluster detects the new version and reconciles. You never run kubectl apply directly anymore.

Day One explains the paradigm and gives you the vocabulary to work confidently in a GitOps-managed environment. You're not the person who installed Flux — you're the developer inheriting it.

Why You're Here

You merged your changes. CI passed and pushed a new OCI artifact to the registry. But you're not sure if Flux picked it up.

  • Flux polls your artifact registry on an interval (usually 1-5 minutes)
  • After detecting a new semver version, it fetches the artifact and reconciles the cluster
  • Check status with kubectl get ocirepository, kubectl get kustomization, or kubectl get helmrelease

Reading Flux Status covers this.

kubectl get is showing resource types — OCIRepository, Kustomization, HelmRelease — that don't exist in a standard cluster.

  • These are Flux's own custom resources, each managing part of the delivery pipeline
  • A source fetches content from a registry; a reconciler applies it to the cluster
  • Knowing what each one represents is the first step to working in a Flux-managed cluster

Flux Resources Explained covers this.

You need to ship a feature, fix a bug, or adjust a config value.

  • Your commit triggers CI, which builds a semantically versioned OCI artifact (e.g. v2.3.1) — never an untagged "latest"
  • Flux deploys the specific versions it's told to; production is pinned to tested versions and doesn't chase the newest build
  • You don't touch kubectl or Helm directly — but "merged" isn't "live in prod" until that version is promoted

Your Flux Workflow covers this.

The Articles

  • What Is GitOps?

    The paradigm behind GitOps — why it exists, what problem it solves, and how FluxCD fits in. Start here.

  • Your Flux Workflow

    The full pipeline from code commit to running deployment — and why enterprise GitOps uses OCI artifacts, not direct Git polling.

  • Reading Flux Status

    The kubectl commands that tell you whether Flux reconciled successfully — and how to read the errors when it didn't.

  • Flux Resources Explained

    OCIRepository, Kustomization, HelmRelease — what each Flux custom resource is and what its output tells you.