In theory, GitOps is neutral. A robot pulls from Git and makes reality match. Everyone gets to review, and every change is versioned. Feels fair. Right?
But in practice, GitOps introduces a very specific kind of power dynamic: the gatekeeper pattern.
Most of the time, it’s the infra or platform team that sets up GitOps. They define the rules—how environments are structured, how approvals work, which tools are allowed. And once that system is live, every change has to go through them.
It sounds like collaboration. In reality, it’s almost always a one-way review.
A backend developer wants to change a config file. They need a review from someone on the platform team. A frontend dev wants to bump a service version. They open a PR. They wait. A product engineer wants to expose a new route for testing. Same story. PR. Wait. Fix a nit. Wait again.
But it doesn’t go the other way. It almost never goes the other direction.
Infra changes things, merges to main, the bot deploys it. No one outside the infra team is reviewing their changes. No one’s stopping their PRs with a comment. They own the system, and everyone else is a guest.
That’s not collaboration. That’s control. """