What is GitOps and how does it differ from traditional CI/CD?

GitOps uses Git as single source of truth for declarative infrastructure and applications. Principles: declarative configuration, versioned and immutable, automatically applied, continuously reconciled. Operators (ArgoCD, Flux) watch Git repos and sync cluster state. Differs from push-based CI/CD: GitOps is pull-based (operator pulls changes), cluster state always matches Git. Benefits: audit trail, easy rollback (git revert), security (no direct cluster access from CI). Challenges: secret management, multi-cluster. Ideal for Kubernetes deployments.