KCNA Cloud Native Application Delivery Practice Question
In GitOps with ArgoCD, what does 'self-healing' refer to?
⚠ Common exam trap
KCNA often tests the confusion between self-healing and other automated actions like scaling or restarting pods, but the key is that self-healing specifically reverts manual changes to match Git.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Automatically reverting manual changes to match the Git repository
In ArgoCD, self-healing refers to the automatic reconciliation of the live cluster state with the desired state defined in Git. When a manual change is made to a resource in the cluster (e.g., editing a Deployment), ArgoCD detects the drift and automatically reverts the resource to match the Git repository. This ensures that Git remains the single source of truth and prevents configuration drift.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Automatically scaling applications based on metrics
Why it's wrong here
Self-healing reconciles live cluster state back to the Git-declared desired state, reverting manual drift; metric-driven scaling is the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler's function. It is tempting because both are automated corrective loops, but scaling responds to load thresholds, whereas self-healing responds to configuration divergence from Git.
- ✗
Automatically restarting failed pods
Why it's wrong here
Self-healing reverts cluster resources that diverge from the Git-declared manifest; restarting crashed pods is the kubelet's liveness-probe remediation. It is tempting because both restore a healthy state, but pod restarts address runtime failure, whereas self-healing addresses configuration drift from the desired Git state.
- ✓
Automatically reverting manual changes to match the Git repository
Why this is correct
Self-healing means ArgoCD continuously compares live cluster state against the desired state declared in Git. When drift is detected, it automatically reapplies the Git version, discarding manual kubectl edits so the repository remains the single source of truth.
- ✗
Automatically updating the Git repository when changes are made in the cluster
Why it's wrong here
Self-healing syncs from Git to the cluster, not the reverse; ArgoCD never commits cluster changes back to the repository. It is tempting because GitOps is bidirectional in concept, but writing cluster state into Git is a separate workflow, and self-healing specifically overwrites out-of-band cluster edits instead.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Cluster Architecture and Lifecycle Management
Key term
GitOps
GitOps is a way to manage and automate cloud infrastructure and applications by using a Git repository as the single source of truth, where all changes are made through pull requests and automatically applied by a software agent.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official CNCF exam blueprint
This KCNA practice question is part of Courseiva's free CNCF certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the KCNA exam.