From GitOps to MLOps: The Evolution of Ops Practices

If there’s one truth in tech, it’s that change is inevitable – especially in how we build, deploy, and manage software. What worked a decade ago is now obsolete, and today’s best practices will soon be replaced by something even better. The way we handle operations (Ops) is no exception.

DevOps was the gold standard, bridging the gap between development and operations to enable faster, more reliable software releases. But as cloud-native architectures and Kubernetes took over, managing infrastructure became a new kind of challenge—one that required GitOps to bring automation, version control, and declarative deployments into the picture.

And now? The rise of machine learning has thrown yet another wrench into the equation. Unlike traditional software, ML models don’t just run; they evolve based on data, requiring continuous monitoring, retraining, and optimization. This complexity has given birth to MLOps, a new frontier that brings DevOps-style automation to machine learning workflows.

So, where are we headed next? Is MLOps the final evolution, or just another stepping stone in the ever-changing Ops landscape? 

DevOps: The Foundation of Modern Software Operations

The Need for DevOps

Before DevOps, the traditional software development model followed a waterfall or siloed approach, where developers wrote code, threw it over the wall to operations teams, and hoped for the best. This approach led to slow release cycles, frequent deployment failures, and misalignment between development and operations teams.

The emergence of Agile development methodologies created pressure for faster release cycles, but without a proper operational framework, rapid iterations often resulted in instability. DevOps emerged as the solution to bridge this gap, fostering collaboration between developers and IT operations through automation, continuous integration, and continuous deployment (CI/CD).

Core Principles of DevOps

At its core, DevOps is about breaking silos and enabling seamless, automated software delivery. The key principles include:

• CI/CD (Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment): Automating the process of integrating code, testing, and deploying applications to ensure rapid and reliable releases.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Treating infrastructure provisioning as code, enabling reproducibility, consistency, and automation.
• Automation & Monitoring: Using tools like Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, and Prometheus to reduce manual intervention and provide real-time observability.
• Collaboration & Culture: Encouraging cross-functional teams to work together, aligning development, security, and operations teams towards shared goals.

GitOps: A Declarative Approach to Operations

Why GitOps Emerged

While DevOps improved collaboration and automation, it didn’t inherently solve the complexity of managing infrastructure at scale. As Kubernetes and cloud-native applications became the norm, teams struggled with:

• Configuration drift – inconsistencies between declared infrastructure states and the actual environment.
• Lack of traceability – manual infrastructure changes that were difficult to track and rollback.
• Operational inefficiencies – complex deployment pipelines that still required manual interventions.

GitOps emerged as an evolution of DevOps, applying Git as the single source of truth for infrastructure and application deployments. Instead of relying on manual configuration and imperative scripting, GitOps enforces a declarative approach where the desired system state is defined in Git repositories and automatically synchronized with production environments.

Core Principles of GitOps

GitOps builds upon DevOps principles but introduces key enhancements:

• Everything as Code: Not just infrastructure but also application configurations, policies, and workflows are stored in Git repositories.
• Declarative Desired State: Instead of defining steps to reach a target state, you declare the final desired state, and automated reconciliation tools (e.g., ArgoCD, Flux) ensure it is achieved.
• Version-Controlled Changes: Every change is committed to Git, providing a complete audit trail, making rollbacks seamless and eliminating “snowflake” environments.
• Automated Synchronization: Continuous deployment tools monitor Git repositories and automatically apply changes when updates are committed.

Advantages of GitOps

GitOps provides several significant benefits:

• Immutable and Auditable Deployments: Since all changes are stored in Git, organizations gain complete visibility and rollback capabilities.
• Reduced Configuration Drift: Declarative infrastructure ensures production environments remain consistent with defined states.
• Improved Developer Experience: Developers interact with infrastructure through pull requests rather than direct manual changes, reducing operational burden.

Use Cases of GitOps

GitOps is particularly effective in:

• Kubernetes-native environments: Automating deployment and configuration management for containerized applications.
• Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments: Ensuring consistent infrastructure across cloud providers.
• High-frequency release cycles: Organizations pushing updates multiple times a day benefit from GitOps’ automation and consistency.

The Rise of MLOps

Why DevOps and GitOps Aren’t Enough for ML

While DevOps and GitOps have transformed software development and infrastructure management, they fall short when applied to machine learning (ML) workflows. Unlike traditional software applications, ML models are dynamic and require continuous updates based on evolving data. This introduces several unique challenges:

• Data Dependency: Unlike traditional applications, ML models are heavily dependent on data, which changes over time and directly impacts model performance.
• Experimentation and Versioning Complexity: ML involves numerous experiments, hyperparameter tuning, and dataset variations, requiring a robust versioning system beyond just code.
• Continuous Training (CT) and Continuous Monitoring (CM): Unlike software, where CI/CD ensures consistency, ML models degrade over time (concept drift), necessitating automated retraining and performance monitoring.
• Reproducibility Challenges: Ensuring that a model trained in a development environment produces the same results in production requires meticulous tracking of code, data, and dependencies.

Core Principles of MLOps

MLOps extends DevOps and GitOps principles by adding machine learning-specific practices. It emphasizes:

• Automated ML Pipelines: Managing data ingestion, preprocessing, model training, evaluation, and deployment in a structured pipeline.
• Model and Data Versioning: Tracking different versions of datasets and models to ensure reproducibility and traceability. Tools like MLflow and DVC are commonly used.
• Continuous Training & Continuous Monitoring: Automating model retraining and monitoring model drift to maintain performance over time.
• Collaboration Across Teams: Bringing together data scientists, ML engineers, and DevOps teams to streamline the ML lifecycle.

How MLOps Differs from GitOps and DevOps

MLOps is not just an optional extension of DevOps – it is a necessity for organizations scaling their machine learning capabilities.

The Future of Ops: What Comes Next?

The evolution from DevOps to GitOps to MLOps has been driven by necessity—each new methodology emerging to address the growing complexity of modern software systems. But the journey doesn’t stop here. As organizations continue to scale their infrastructure, leverage AI, and optimize cloud spending, new operational paradigms are already taking shape. AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) is leading this charge, using machine learning to automate incident detection, root cause analysis, and even self-healing systems. Meanwhile, FinOps is becoming essential for managing cloud costs efficiently, ensuring that engineering teams build with financial accountability in mind.

Beyond automation and cost management, Platform Engineering is redefining how developers interact with infrastructure. Instead of juggling multiple Ops methodologies, organizations are moving towards building Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs)—self-service environments that abstract away complexity while enforcing security, compliance, and best practices. The future of Ops isn’t about choosing between DevOps, GitOps, or MLOps; it’s about seamlessly integrating these methodologies into a unified, scalable, and intelligent operational framework. The next era of Ops will be defined by automation, cost efficiency, and developer experience, ensuring that businesses stay agile in an increasingly complex tech landscape.

Conclusion

The landscape of operations has evolved rapidly:

• DevOps revolutionized software development and deployment.
• GitOps brought a declarative, version-controlled approach to infrastructure management.
• MLOps extended these principles to the machine learning lifecycle, addressing the unique challenges of data and model management.

But the evolution doesn’t stop here. As cloud adoption, AI integration, and operational complexity increase, organizations must continuously adapt their Ops strategies to remain competitive.