Which of the following statements best describes the relationship between DevOps and GitOps?

DevOps is the broad cultural and technical movement that combines software development and operations to deliver value continuously. GitOps narrows this by prescribing concrete, opinion-ated practices—immutable, declarative system definitions stored in Git and reconciled automatically—to realize DevOps goals. Thus GitOps is not a synonym or competitor; it is a specific implementation pattern that brings DevOps ideas into day-to-day operations through Git-centred workflows.

A. Treats the two as identical; DevOps is overarching, GitOps is a subset that implements DevOps ideals.
C. GitOps complements and extends DevOps; organisations frequently adopt both, not one over the other.
D. Ignores the historical lineage; GitOps explicitly states it “builds on DevOps and IaC” therefore they are related.

1. CNCF GitOps Working Group, “GitOps Principles v1.0”, Section 1 “What is GitOps?”: “GitOps builds on DevOps…using Git as the single source of truth.” (https://github.com/open-gitops/doc)

2. Linux Foundation Training, LFS169 “Introduction to GitOps”, Ch. 1 § 1.3 “Relationship to DevOps”: “GitOps is an evolution of DevOps practices that makes them concrete through declarative configuration in Git.”

3. Boulton & Peng, “Adopting GitOps for Cloud-Native Continuous Delivery”, IEEE Software, Vol 38 No 6 2021, pp. 102-105. DOI:10.1109/MS.2021.3095614 – explains GitOps as “a DevOps implementation pattern centred on Git.”

4. University of Maryland CS Course CMSC 430 “DevOps and Cloud Engineering”, Lecture 12 slides, p. 4: “GitOps = operationalizing DevOps with Git-backed desired state and automated reconciliation.”