GitOps at scale: When declarative gets messy

GitOps looks elegant in diagrams. Reality at scale is more complex. As environments grow, teams encounter repository sprawl, long PR queues, sync conflicts, secret management challenges, and drift between clusters. In this talk, the speaker shares practical lessons from running GitOps in production and the hidden operational costs that teams rarely discuss. The session examines governance patterns, repository strategies, and how to prevent platform bottlenecks while preserving declarative workflows. It focuses on trade-offs, not tooling hype, and offers guidance for platform teams adopting GitOps at scale.