What is the difference between GitOps and CI/CD?

GitOps and CI/CD are complementary approaches to managing software deployments, particularly in complex cloud-native environments like Kubernetes. While CI/CD pipelines focus on automating the integration and delivery of application code through a push-based model, GitOps introduces a pull-based approach where Git serves as the single source of truth for infrastructure and code changes. In GitOps, operators within the target environment automatically synchronize desired configurations from Git repositories, ensuring production matches the declared state and reducing the risk of configuration drift. This model enhances security by keeping production credentials within the cluster and provides a robust audit trail through pull requests. GitOps is particularly advantageous for teams managing multiple Kubernetes clusters, requiring frequent infrastructure changes, or needing strict change control and auditability. Many teams employ a hybrid model, using CI/CD for application builds and GitOps for infrastructure deployment with feature flags to manage releases, thus combining the speed of automated builds with the safety of declarative infrastructure management.