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CGOA Study Plan

Four weeks at 4-6 hours per week. This is a concept exam, so reading and reasoning matter more than lab time, though one week of hands-on makes everything concrete.

Week 1: Principles

  • Read opengitops.dev end to end, including the principles document
  • Write out the four principles from memory, then check the exact wording
  • For each principle, write down what breaks if you drop it
  • Desired state versus actual state; define drift precisely
  • Reconciliation loops, convergence, and idempotency
  • Articulate why a pipeline running kubectl apply is not GitOps
  • Review Notes: notes/01-gitops-principles.md

Week 2: Terminology and patterns

  • Work through the OpenGitOps glossary; define each term in your own words then compare
  • State store, agent, reconciliation, drift, convergence, rollback
  • Pull versus push models and the security consequence of each
  • Repository strategy: monorepo versus polyrepo, app repo versus config repo
  • Environment modeling: branch per environment versus directory per environment, and why directories are usually preferred
  • Promotion between environments, gated and automated
  • Kustomize overlays and Helm values as templating approaches
  • Review Notes: notes/02-gitops-terminology.md and notes/03-gitops-patterns.md

Week 3: Secrets, drift, multi-cluster, and practices

  • Secret management: Sealed Secrets, External Secrets Operator, SOPS, and their trade-offs
  • Drift remediation policy: detect and alert versus automatic self-heal, and when each is right
  • Resources that legitimately change outside the state store, such as HPA replica counts
  • Multi-cluster and multi-tenancy patterns
  • Progressive delivery: blue-green, canary, and how they coexist with GitOps
  • CI versus CD boundaries; where the image tag update happens
  • Policy as code with OPA Gatekeeper and Kyverno
  • Security: agent least privilege, signed commits, provenance, admission control
  • DORA metrics and the effect of GitOps on each
  • Lab: install Argo CD or Flux on kind, sync an app, cause drift, observe self-heal, revert a commit
  • Review Notes: notes/04-related-practices-and-tooling.md

Week 4: Tooling breadth and review

  • Argo CD and Flux: architecture at a high level, not configuration detail
  • Kustomize, Helm, jsonnet: what each is for
  • Argo Rollouts and Flagger for progressive delivery
  • Where each tool sits in the CNCF landscape and its maturity level
  • Work every scenario in scenarios.md
  • Two timed practice exams
  • Re-read the principles one final time; they are 30% of the exam

Readiness check

  • Recite the four OpenGitOps principles in the official wording
  • Explain why push-based CD violates two of them
  • Define drift, convergence, and reconciliation without hedging
  • Argue for directory-per-environment over branch-per-environment
  • Explain three ways to keep secrets out of a state store, and their trade-offs
  • Describe when self-heal should be off
  • Explain where CI ends and GitOps begins in a full delivery pipeline