GitOps consulting:
deployments your repo can explain.

What does a GitOps consultant actually do?

A GitOps consultant makes Git the single source of truth for what runs in your clusters and installs the machinery that keeps it true: they design the desired-state repositories and the environment promotion model, stand up Argo CD or Flux with the right tenancy and access controls, move each application from push-based pipeline deploys to pull-based reconciliation, wire drift detection and policy gates, and hand over runbooks so your engineers own the loop. The work is engineering, delivered in pull requests your team reviews.

In practice it is a handful of recurring jobs:

• Decide the shape before the tool — how many repositories, how application config separates from platform config, and how a change moves from dev to production, all written down first.
• Install one reconciler and prove the loop — one non-critical service under management end to end, with sync, health and rollback exercised, before anything important moves.
• Migrate without a cutover weekend — inventory, declarative-ise, observe, parallel-run, cut over one environment at a time, then remove the cluster credentials from CI.
• Leave properly — documentation, pairing sessions, an on-call runbook for reconciliation failures, and a handover that ends the dependency on the consultant.

The method is the one written down in the OpenGitOps principles: declarative, versioned and immutable, pulled automatically, continuously reconciled. If you want the concepts first, start with what GitOps is; this page is about getting it running.

GitOps implementation services, itemised

Every engagement is one of these shapes or a sequence of them. Durations are typical, not promises; the scoping call replaces them with yours.

Where GitOps meets the infrastructure underneath the clusters, the same discipline runs through Terraform consulting: plan in the pull request, policy on every plan, nobody applying from a laptop.

Should we use Argo CD or Flux?

Choose Argo CD when people need to see and operate deployments through a UI, when many teams share clusters and need projects with fine-grained RBAC, and when ApplicationSets will generate a large estate from a few templates. Choose Flux when you want a smaller, controller-only footprint, image update automation that writes tags back to Git, or a platform where the UI is deliberately not in the critical path. Both are CNCF-graduated and both reconcile correctly; the wrong choice is the one nobody wrote a rationale for.

Sources: Argo CD documentation, Flux documentation, and AWS's prescriptive guidance on Argo CD and Flux use cases. The longer comparison, including how each handles Helm and Kustomize, is in our GitOps guide.

How do you migrate from push-based CI/CD to GitOps?

You migrate one application and one environment at a time, never the estate at once: make the application's config declarative, put it in the desired-state repository, let the operator observe it without syncing, run the old pipeline deploy and the new reconciliation in parallel until they agree, cut over, and only then delete the pipeline's deploy step and its cluster credentials. Rollback at every stage is a Git revert or re-enabling the old path.

1. Inventory every deploy path. Pipelines, scripts, the Helm command in someone's shell history. Classify each application by how declarative it already is and how much it matters.
2. Establish the desired-state repository. Environment structure, overlays or values, ownership, and the promotion rule, decided once and written into the README.
3. Observe before you sync. Register the application with automated sync off. The operator shows the diff between Git and the cluster; that diff is your migration backlog.
4. Parallel-run, then cut over per environment. Dev first, production last, with the old path still able to deploy until the new one has shipped real changes.
5. Turn on self-heal and drift alerts. Once reconciliation is trusted, automated sync with pruning and self-heal makes manual cluster edits disappear on the next loop, and alerts tell you someone tried.
6. Remove cluster credentials from CI. The step most migrations never finish. CI builds and tests; the cluster pulls. Audit the removal.

The traps are the same everywhere: half-migrated clusters where two systems fight over one Deployment, secrets copied into Git "temporarily", and a promotion model nobody agreed on. Each is avoidable if it is decided in the readiness review rather than discovered in production.

GitOps for regulated teams

GitOps is the cheapest way we know to satisfy change-management controls without slowing delivery, because the controls fall out of the mechanism: the change record is the commit, the approval is the pull-request review, separation of duties is the difference between who may merge and who may touch the cluster, and the evidence that production matches the approved state is the operator's own sync status. We map those to the control language your assessor uses and package the evidence.

Industry specifics live on their own pages: DevOps for fintech covers RBI, CERT-In and PCI-DSS change control; DevOps for healthcare covers HIPAA audit trails; DevSecOps covers the pipeline security that GitOps assumes is already there.