Flux on AKS in Twenty Minutes

People defer GitOps because it sounds like a quarter-long platform initiative. The full platform might be. But your first working reconciliation on AKS is a coffee break, and doing it once teaches the model better than any diagram.

The shape, start to finish:

1. Get Flux into the cluster. On AKS you have two clean options: enable the managed GitOps extension (Flux, lifecycle handled by Azure) so you don't operate the reconciler yourself, or run flux bootstrap with the CLI for full control. For a first taste, the managed extension is the least friction.
2. Point it at a repo. Create a Git repository with a couple of plain manifests, a Deployment and a Service for some trivial app. This repo is now the desired state.
3. Declare the source and a reconciliation. Tell Flux which repo and path to watch. That's the whole wiring: a source, and a thing that says "make the cluster match this path."
4. Watch it converge. Flux pulls the repo and applies it. Your app appears, not because a pipeline pushed it, but because the cluster pulled it.

Now do the thing that makes it click: edit a manifest in Git, bump the replica count, and commit. Within the reconcile interval, the cluster changes to match. You didn't run kubectl. You changed the source of truth, and the cluster followed. Then try the reverse: kubectl scale the deployment by hand and watch Flux quietly revert it back to what Git says. That snap-back is GitOps. Drift doesn't survive.

That's the entire mental shift, earned in twenty minutes: the cluster follows the repo, continuously. Everything else in GitOps (environments, promotions, secrets, multi-cluster) is elaboration on that one loop. Start with the loop. Build the platform later.