In GitOps practices, when does CD take part?

In GitOps, Continuous Deployment (CD) follows after Continuous Integration (CI). CI is responsible for building and testing application code, while CD automates the delivery and deployment of these changes into runtime environments. The Git repository serves as the single source of truth, and when CI merges new changes into the main branch, CD reconciles the state of the environment to match what is declared in Git.

“GitOps builds on the principles of DevOps by using Git as the source of truth for declarative infrastructure and applications. CI pipelines handle the integration and testing of code, and CD pipelines or agents automatically reconcile the desired state in Git with the actual state in the cluster.”

This shows that CD is triggered after CI to handle deployment automation, ensuring systems remain in sync with what is declared in version control.