Comparison
GitOps driftvsReconciliation loop
GitOps drift
someone scaled the deployment by hand during a spike and the agent scaled it straight back down, twice.
Divergence between the repository's declared state and the cluster's actual state, which a reconciling agent will correct without being asked. It makes emergency manual intervention a fight with automation, and the resolution is either to commit the change or to pause reconciliation deliberately for the duration. Teams that do neither spend an incident wondering why their fix keeps disappearing.
Full entry →Reconciliation loop
something reads the difference between what you asked for and what exists, takes one step to close it, and then does it all again forever.
The pattern every controller implements: observe actual state, compare to desired state, act, repeat. It is level-triggered rather than edge-triggered — it looks at where things are, not at what event just happened — which is why a missed message or a crashed controller is self-healing rather than fatal. It also explains the characteristic feel of these systems: nothing fails outright, things simply stay wrong while something retries, so timeouts and events matter more than error codes.
Full entry →