GitOps made deployment a solved problem: declare the desired state, let the reconciliation loop converge, and read the source control log to know what changed and who approved it. "Runtime mutation is an anti-pattern" is a well-known approach, but even so, the majority of incident reviews still include the sentence "wait, who and why turned that on?" The accountability layer based on GitOps alone can answer what-deployed-like questions, but it is silent on what was activated, for whom, and why.

This talk draws the clean line between the deployment layer and the release layer, takes the purist's objection head-on, and surfaces the org-chart problem hiding underneath - that most likely nobody owns the release decision.

Category: Infrastructure / Platform Engineering
Level: 300 (advanced)
Audience: Infrastructure / DevOps / SysOps / Platform Engineers; Architects / Technical Team Leads / Product Managers