Glossary

Artifact — Immutable content produced or fetched by a source controller and consumed by another controller.

Chart — Versioned Helm package containing templates, default values, and metadata.

Controller — A control loop that observes resources and acts to move observed state toward desired state.

Desired state — The declared configuration a controller attempts to realize.

Drift — A difference between declared desired state and live observed state.

GitOps — Operating a system through version-controlled, declarative desired state reconciled automatically by software agents.

HelmRelease — Flux resource declaring a Helm installation, values, timing, tests, and remediation policy.

Hook — Helm-managed resource executed for an install, upgrade, test, rollback, or delete lifecycle event.

Kustomization (Flux) — Flux resource that builds, applies, health-checks, and optionally prunes manifests from a source. It is distinct from a kustomization.yaml file.

Observed state — The state a controller currently sees in the target system.

OCIRepository — Flux source for an artifact stored in an OCI registry, including a Helm chart in Artifact Registry.

Reconciliation — Repeated comparison and correction of desired and observed state.

Remediation — Helm-controller behavior after failed install, upgrade, test, or rollback operations.

Source of truth — The authoritative desired-state location; in this course, the Git bootstrap repository plus the versioned chart artifact it references.

Workload Identity Federation for GKE — Mapping that lets Kubernetes workloads access Google APIs with short-lived credentials and IAM, without a downloaded service-account key.