OCI Is Not Git: Rethinking the GitOps Source of Truth for a Kubernetes-Native… M. Crenshaw & R. Lieb

Michael Crenshaw and Robin Lieb discuss the trade-offs between Git and OCI as sources of truth in GitOps workflows.

Don't miss out! Join us at our next KubeCon + CloudNativeCon events in Shanghai, China (8-9 September, 2026) and Salt Lake City, United States (Nov 9–12, 2026). Connect with our current graduated, incubating, and sandbox projects as the community gathers to further the education and advancement of cloud native computing. Learn more at kubecon.io OCI Is Not Git: Rethinking the GitOps Source of Truth for a Kubernetes-Native World - Michael Crenshaw, Intuit & Robin Lieb, Independent GitOps started with a simple idea: Git is the source of truth. But as the ecosystem matures, OCI is increasingly used to ship Kubernetes config, and the gaps are becoming hard to ignore. Git gives you history, blame, diffing, and PR-based review for free. OCI gives you content-addressable, distribution-ready, airgap-compatible artifacts. Yet the industry is replacing one with the other as though the properties of Git were incidental, not foundational. This talk introduces Kokumi, an experimental config delivery tool designed for an OCI-first world. Kokumi integrates with Helm and Kustomize to define per-environment config, renders OCI artifacts, and delivers them via Argo CD. This functionality is wrapped in a beautiful UI that feels like the future of Kubernetes deployment. What does the future of OCI-Ops look like? This talk won’t have all the answers. But it will offer a glimpse into the future and spark the audience’s imagination so that we can build that future together.