This recipe showed you how to manage and implement basic version control of your configuration files using Git.

In the Creating a base for a development and production Deployment recipe, the resources we created between step 2 and step 6 under the base directory represents an upstream repository of the application/workload, and the customizations we created between step 8 and step 10 under the overlay directory are the changes you control and store in your repository. 

Later, if you need to see the difference of a variant, you can use the diff parameter as follows:

$ kubectl diff -k registry/overlays/prod/

By separating the changes from the base, we were able to customize template-free YAML files for multiple purposes, leaving the original YAML files unchanged, making the version controlling of source and changes possible.