I am interested in how teams define the responsibility boundary between their CI pipeline and GitOps deployment process.

My preferred model is that CI produces evidence and an immutable artifact:

• The source revision is known.
• Automated tests have passed.
• Quality and dependency policies have passed.
• The container image has been scanned.
• The artifact digest and software bill of materials are recorded.

The deployment workflow then updates reviewed environment configuration, usually through Helm values or another declarative mechanism. Argo CD reconciles that desired state into Kubernetes without rebuilding or mutating the artifact.

This separation improves provenance, but it introduces design questions around repository ownership, automated version updates, promotion between environments, failed reconciliation, configuration drift, and rollback.

How has your team divided ownership among the application repository, environment repository, CI system, artifact registry, and GitOps controller?

#CICD #GitOps #ArgoCD #Kubernetes #PlatformEngineering