Intuit, the creators of Argo CD and pioneers in GitOps, have been tackling the persistent challenge of environment promotion in our more than 17,000 services. Traditional CI-based promotion tools like Jenkins result in a subpar user experience. To address this, we’ve begun transitioning to GitOps Promoter, deploying it across several Intuit assets with promising results. The new promotion system is transparent, easy to use, and simple to debug.

While the experience has been largely positive, we’re actively working through challenges such as monorepo complexities, the Promoter’s "interrupt model" of handling frequent deployments, and the need for enhancements in Argo CD’s new Source Hydrator feature. We’ve contributed improvements to the Hydrator’s commit messages by adding templating support, and we’ve solved the longstanding problem of tracing manifest commits to code commits. This talk will share our journey, lessons learned, and the future of GitOps-driven environment promotion.