There is a lot of confusion between DevOps and GitOps terminology. In this article, we are going to make it clear for everyone.
It's not DevOps vs GitOps!
It's DevOps with GitOps!
GitOps is a practice that is a part of DevOps culture. Essentially, DevOps culture has a very broad meaning, spanning from social and cultural aspects to technical processes. One of the important bits of DevOps culture is to enable better collaboration within the autonomous team and enable them to move quickly. It often comes together with introducing reliable workflows such as GitOps into the team's routine. GitOps is one of DevOps practices, not a competing concept in its own right.
GitOps is a practice to manage deployments of the software and provision infrastructure using Git-based repositories to store the desired state of the infrastructure. DevOps, on the other hand, is a culture that focuses on breaking silos in the organization and embracing collaboration, shared responsibility, to increase the velocity of the software product team.
While GitOps is something very deeply practical, narrow in sense of application, DevOps culture is really a broad term that includes GitOps in itself. It's very common that GitOps contributes to healthy DevOps culture, but never is a key component by itself. You can always find areas to improve, and we at Portainer see huge value in educating fellow engineers in the field, both by creating an awesome product and by writing these articles.