GitOps With ArgoCD and QuickInfra: Managing Infrastructure and Application State From Git

GitOps extends the principles of infrastructure-as-code to application deployment: git is the single source of truth for what should be running, and a reconciliation agent continuously ensures reality matches the declared state in git. ArgoCD is the most widely adopted GitOps tool for Kubernetes workloads.

How GitOps Differs From Traditional CI/CD

In a traditional push-based CI/CD pipeline, the pipeline has deploy credentials and pushes changes to the target environment when a build completes. If a human makes a manual change directly in the target environment, the pipeline doesn't know and won't reconcile.

In a GitOps pull-based model, an agent running in the cluster (ArgoCD) pulls the desired state from git and continuously reconciles. Manual changes to the cluster are detected and flagged — or automatically reverted. The pipeline's job is to update the git repository (change the image tag), not to deploy directly.

ArgoCD Architecture

ArgoCD runs in your Kubernetes cluster and watches a git repository. When the repository changes, ArgoCD applies the changes to the cluster. You can configure it to apply automatically (auto-sync) or to wait for manual approval (manual sync). The ArgoCD UI shows the diff between what git declares and what the cluster contains.

QuickInfra's Role

QuickInfra handles the infrastructure layer beneath Kubernetes: the EKS cluster itself, node groups, VPC, security groups, IAM roles, and managed services (RDS, ElastiCache) that the application uses. ArgoCD handles the Kubernetes workload layer on top.

This division is clean: QuickInfra manages "what infrastructure exists," ArgoCD manages "what runs on the infrastructure."

The CI Pipeline's Job in a GitOps World

In a GitOps workflow, the CI pipeline has a narrow responsibility: build the container image, run tests, push the image to ECR, and update the image tag in the git repository. That's it. The deploy happens when ArgoCD detects the tag change and syncs the application.

QuickInfra's CI/CD pipeline supports this pattern via a Custom Script stage that commits the new image tag to your GitOps repository after a successful image build.

Rollbacks

GitOps makes rollbacks explicit: revert the commit that changed the image tag, and ArgoCD automatically deploys the previous version. No special rollback command, no separate rollback pipeline — just a git operation.