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Reconciliation and Drift

Overview

At the heart of GitOps is a simple loop. An agent continuously compares two things, the desired state in Git and the actual state in the cluster, and works to make them match. That loop is called reconciliation.

The reconciliation loop

flowchart LR
    Git[Git: desired state] --> Agent[GitOps agent]
    Agent -->|compares and applies| Cluster[Cluster: actual state]
    Cluster -->|watches for difference| Agent

The agent repeats this constantly: read Git, read the cluster, and if they differ, change the cluster to match Git. Git always wins.

What drift is

Drift is any difference between the cluster and Git. It happens when someone changes the cluster directly, bypassing Git, for example scaling a deployment by hand.

Left unmanaged, drift is how systems become mysterious: nobody is sure why production looks the way it does, because changes were made outside any record.

Self-healing

When the agent is set to self-heal, reconciliation does not just report drift, it corrects it. A manual change to the cluster is detected and reverted to whatever Git says. Manual tinkering simply does not stick.

This gives two guarantees:

  • The cluster always trends back to the state described in Git.
  • To change the system, you must change Git, so every change is reviewed and recorded.

Why it matters

Reconciliation turns "deploy" from a one-time action into a continuous property. The system is not just deployed correctly once, it is kept correct, indefinitely, without anyone watching over it.

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