A real-world GitOps pipeline
This is the shape of the pipeline I worked alongside: GoCD → image in ECR/ACR/GAR → Helm chart → release repo → ArgoCD → EKS.
Principles
- Build once, deploy many. The same image digest goes to dev, staging and prod; only config differs.
- Git is the desired state. Nobody runs
kubectl applyby hand in prod. - Pull-based deploys: ArgoCD pulls from Git, so CI never holds cluster credentials.
- Rollback = git revert. Every change is audited.
- Progressive delivery: canary or blue-green using Argo Rollouts or Istio weights.
CI stages worth having
Unit tests → lint/type-check → SCA and container scan → build image → integration and contract tests → push → update the env repo → smoke tests after sync.
Cheatsheet
The whole topic on one page. Click to open full screen.
Sources & further learning
Videos, courses, docs and books I recommend for this topic.
Related topics
Kubernetes Essentials for Architects
The objects that matter — Deployment, Service, Ingress, ConfigMap/Secret, HPA — and the settings that decide reliability (probes, requests/limits, PDBs).
The Twelve-Factor App
Twelve rules for building cloud-native services that are portable, scalable and deployable anywhere — config in env, stateless processes, logs as streams.
Observability — Logs, Metrics, Traces
Know what your system is doing in production — the three pillars, OpenTelemetry, SLIs/SLOs, and alerting on symptoms not causes.