blumeops/docs/explanation/why-gitops.md

title	tags
why-gitops	explanation philosophy

Why GitOps?

Note: This article was drafted by AI and reviewed by Erich. I plan to rewrite all explanatory content in my own words - these serve as placeholders to establish the documentation structure.

BlumeOps uses GitOps principles for managing personal infrastructure. This might seem like overkill for a homelab, but there are good reasons.

The Problem with Manual Infrastructure

Traditional server management involves SSHing into machines and running commands. This works, but creates problems:

• Drift: The actual state diverges from what you think it is
• Amnesia: You forget what you changed and why
• Fragility: One bad command can break things with no easy rollback
• Bus factor: Only you know how it works (even AI assistants struggle without context)

Git as the Source of Truth

GitOps inverts the model: instead of pushing changes to servers, you commit desired state to Git, and automation pulls it into reality.

Benefits:

• Every change is tracked with commit history
• Pull requests enable review before deployment
• Rollback is just git revert
• The repo is the documentation

Why This Matters for a Homelab

A personal homelab isn't a production environment, but it shares the same challenges:

1. Memory is unreliable - Six months from now, you won't remember why you configured Caddy that way
2. Experimentation is constant - You try things, break things, want to undo things
3. AI assistance needs context - Claude can help much more effectively when it can read your infrastructure as code

The BlumeOps Approach

BlumeOps uses layered GitOps:

Layer	Tool	What it manages
Tailnet	[[reference/infrastructure/tailscale	Pulumi]]
Host config	[[reference/ansible/roles	Ansible]]
Kubernetes	[[argocd	ArgoCD]]

Each layer has its own reconciliation loop:

• Pulumi applies on mise run tailnet-up
• Ansible applies on mise run provision-indri
• ArgoCD watches Git and syncs manually or automatically

Trade-offs

GitOps isn't free:

• Learning curve - You need to understand Ansible, ArgoCD, Pulumi
• Indirection - Can't just apt install something; need to add it to config
• Complexity - More moving parts than a simple server

But for BlumeOps, the trade-off is worth it. The infrastructure is complex enough that managing it imperatively would be error-prone, and the GitOps approach enables effective AI-assisted operations.

Related

• architecture - How the pieces fit together
• argocd - Kubernetes GitOps
• reference/ansible/roles - Host configuration