Brian Grant

GitOps terminology clarification: Use Git as a Source of Record, and Kubernetes as a Source of Truth. https://www.taos.com/source-of-record-vs-source-of-truth/ …

It's stronger than that if done right because record and truth are kept in a reconcilation loop.

GitOps sucks with k8s. That reconciliation loop should be one-way flowing from desire to realized. But k8s uses a bi-directional mutation. Mirroring that back to git is dumb. Complicated merge is dumb. Mediocre.

I haven't seen this behavior of k8s modifying git. Typically it is as you describe, desired state comes from git and is fed to k8s, k8s then attempts to make that a reality.

The issue is k8s mutates the resources under its own management in ways that conflict with declarative representation in git. Requiring merge on rollout.

I see, yeah, basically "kubectl apply" is required, is not a pure update, but a merge process. The only thing I wish k8s had done differently there would be that spec and status were two different resources. But that's the beauty of hindsight.

K8s itself is a distributed system with bidirectional state mutation (lots of concurrency). It doesn’t take a distributed systems master to anticipate these issues. Ironically, using git as the k8s backend would have at least been functionally correct.

i don't think you really give enough credit to k8s here. k8s is a system that allows mutation, but bidirectional, as you say, is not a core tenet and would be more a flaw in implementation. i think you'd prefer a system based on immutable data, which I too think is compelling