Traditional infrastructure GitOps workflows, commonly built on tools like Terraform or OpenTofu, often struggle with state management, limited reconciliation, and delayed drift detection. Because these systems operate outside the Kubernetes control plane, infrastructure changes follow different lifecycle and failure semantics than applications, making it difficult to reason about system-wide correctness and safety.

We’ll present a unified approach for managing both applications and infrastructure through the Kubernetes control plane. This approach brings together GitOps controllers and Crossplane to extend the Kubernetes API to infrastructure via an ecosystem of community-supported providers spanning major clouds, alternative clouds, and on-prem. The result is a vendor-neutral foundation where applications and infrastructure follow the same review, lifecycle, and reconciliation model.