1. Why Imperative CI/CD Pipelines Break
Traditional deployment pipelines run bash scripts that execute `kubectl apply` or `terraform apply` on commit. If a deployment fails midway, the infrastructure is left in an undefined state with no automatic rollback mechanism.
GitOps solves this by shifting from push-based pipelines to pull-based reconciliation loops.
2. Declarative Infrastructure with ArgoCD
ArgoCD operates as an operator inside the Kubernetes cluster. It polls the Git repository, detects diffs, and executes automated sync operations according to specified maintenance windows and canary health checks.