ArgoCD GitOps Essentials: Quick Reference

February 1, 2026•Salih Kayiplar

argocd

gitops

kubernetes

deployment

CIOps vs GitOps

	CIOps (Push)	GitOps (Pull)
How	CI pipeline pushes to cluster	ArgoCD watches git, syncs to cluster
Use for	Dev/test environments	Staging/production

Core Concepts

Concept	What it means
Application	CRD grouping K8s resources from a manifest
Target state	What's in Git
Live state	What's in the cluster
Sync	Making live = target
Refresh	Comparing Git vs live
Health	Is the app actually running and serving?

Architecture

API Server: gRPC/REST for Web UI, CLI, CI/CD. Handles auth + RBAC.
Repo Server: Caches git repos, generates manifests from Helm/Kustomize/YAML.
App Controller: Watches running apps, detects OutOfSync, runs lifecycle hooks.

Supported config management

Kustomize, Helm, Jsonnet, plain YAML

Lifecycle hooks order

PreSync → Sync → PostSync → SyncFail

Use for blue/green and canary with Argo Rollouts.

Gotcha

ArgoCD does not handle traffic shifting or canary analysis — pair it with Argo Rollouts for that
Healthy and Synced are independent — an app can be synced but unhealthy (e.g. CrashLoopBackOff)
Refresh interval is 3 minutes by default. For faster detection, configure webhooks (GitHub/GitLab/BitBucket)

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