GitOps is the latest religion in DevOps, and like most religions, it's built on faith rather than evidence.
Teams are rushing to implement ArgoCD, Flux, and declarative everything because thought leaders promised them the holy grail: "Git as the single source of truth." But after watching dozens of organizations attempt this transformation, I've discovered something uncomfortable: most GitOps implementations make systems more complex, not simpler.
The Problem: We've Confused Process with Progress
The GitOps pitch sounds compelling: store your infrastructure configuration in Git, let automated systems sync the desired state, and achieve deployment nirvana through declarative manifests. In theory, it's elegant. In practice, it's a complexity theater that makes teams feel sophisticated while solving problems they never actually had.
Here's what actually happens when most teams "do GitOps":
- Configuration Explosion: Simple deployments now require YAML files spread across multiple repositories
- Debugging Nightmares: When something breaks, the cause could be in application code, infrastructure manifests, or the GitOps operator itself
- Permission Paralysis: Teams spend weeks designing Git workflows that satisfy security requirements while maintaining developer velocity
- Tool Sprawl: ArgoCD for deployments, Sealed Secrets for secrets, External Secrets for external secrets, Crossplane for infrastructure, and a dozen operators to make it all work
The uncomfortable truth: You've replaced a simple deployment script with a distributed system that requires a PhD to troubleshoot.
The Mental Model Error
GitOps evangelists make a fundamental assumption: that infrastructure should be managed like application code. This sounds logical until you examine what it actually means.
Application code changes frequently, gets reviewed, tested, and versioned because it's constantly evolving. Infrastructure, when done correctly, should be boring and stable. Making infrastructure as dynamic as application code isn't progress it's introducing unnecessary volatility into the most critical layer of your system.
Consider this: AWS has been running the same basic infrastructure patterns for over a decade. Their success comes from stability and predictability, not from treating infrastructure like a constantly changing codebase.
Solution: Selective Adoption Over Religious Conversion
The GitOps pattern has value in specific contexts, but most teams implement it everywhere because they've been told it's a "best practice." Here's when GitOps actually makes sense:
Good Use Cases:
- Multi-environment promotion pipelines where you need audit trails
- Compliance-heavy industries requiring infrastructure change approval processes
- Large organizations with clear separation between platform and application teams
Poor Use Cases:
- Simple applications with straightforward deployment needs
- Teams under 50 people who can coordinate through communication
- Organizations where infrastructure changes are infrequent
- Environments where debugging speed matters more than process formality
Real-World Outcome: What Actually Works
I worked with a team that spent eight months implementing a full GitOps workflow with ArgoCD, managing 15 microservices across three environments. Their deployment process went from 5 minutes to 45 minutes, their troubleshooting time increased by 300%, and their infrastructure team doubled in size to manage the complexity.
The solution? They kept GitOps for their production promotion process (where audit trails mattered) and went back to simple deployment scripts for development and staging. Deployment time dropped to 2 minutes, troubleshooting became trivial, and they reduced their infrastructure team by 40%.
The lesson wasn't that GitOps is bad—it was that applying it universally created problems they didn't have before.
The Lesson: Context Over Dogma
The DevOps industry has a pattern: take a useful practice from a specific context, universalize it, and sell it as the solution to everything. GitOps follows this exact trajectory.
Google and Netflix use GitOps like patterns because they deploy thousands of services across global infrastructure with strict compliance requirements. You probably don't. Adopting their solutions without their problems is cargo cult engineering.
The real insight: Successful teams optimize for their actual constraints, not theoretical best practices.
The Strategic Question
Before implementing GitOps, ask yourself:
- What specific problem am I trying to solve?
- Will GitOps solve this problem better than simpler alternatives?
- Am I implementing this because I need it or because everyone else is doing it?
Most teams discover that their deployment problems aren't solved by better process they're solved by better platforms that make process irrelevant.
The future isn't about perfect GitOps implementations. It's about building systems so simple and reliable that elaborate deployment processes become unnecessary.
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