GitOps with ArgoCD on Amazon EKS: A Practical Walkthrough

GitOps brings the discipline of version control to operations: the desired state of your cluster lives in Git, and a controller continuously makes reality match it. Here is how I run it on Amazon EKS with ArgoCD.

Why GitOps?

Instead of pushing changes with kubectl, you commit manifests to Git. ArgoCD watches the repo and reconciles the cluster — every change is reviewable, auditable and revertible. Drift is detected and healed automatically.

Bootstrapping ArgoCD on EKS

Provision the cluster with Terraform, then install ArgoCD and point it at your config repo. The app-of-apps pattern lets one root Application manage all the others.

apiVersion: argoproj.io/v1alpha1
kind: Application
metadata:
  name: root
spec:
  source:
    repoURL: https://github.com/you/gitops
    path: apps
  syncPolicy:
    automated: { prune: true, selfHeal: true }

Safe, progressive delivery

With automated sync, prune and self-heal, a bad change is one git revert away. Sync waves order your resources, and health checks gate promotion across environments.

Wrapping Up

GitOps turns deployments into pull requests — predictable, auditable and easy to roll back. On EKS with ArgoCD, shipping becomes boring in the best way.