🤖 AI Summary
In cross-organizational, cross-domain, and offline distributed entity collaboration, existing API- and message-broker-based approaches struggle to simultaneously ensure auditability, loose coupling, and participant autonomy. Method: This paper proposes a GitOps-based coordination model that uses Git as a shared state repository, leverages Kubernetes-style Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) with declarative spec/status fields to represent desired and observed states, and integrates cryptographic commit signing, fine-grained access control, and Operator-driven automated synchronization. Contribution/Results: The model extends GitOps beyond intra-cluster operations to inter-organizational coordination, natively supporting version traceability, operational auditing, and state reproducibility. Experiments demonstrate significant improvements over RESTful APIs and message middleware in transparency, auditability, offline fault tolerance, and operational observability—while preserving participant autonomy and system decoupling.
📝 Abstract
This paper introduces a lightweight and auditable method for asynchronous information exchange between distributed entities using Git as the coordination medium. The proposed approach replaces traditional APIs and message brokers with a Git-based communication model built on the principles of Kubernetes Operators and Custom Resources (CRs). Each participating entity, designated as a Publisher or Consumer, interacts through a shared repository that serves as a single source of truth, where the spec field captures the desired state and the status field reflects the observed outcome. This pattern extends GitOps beyond infrastructure management to support cross-domain, inter-organizational, and air-gapped collaboration scenarios. By leveraging Git native features (versioning, commit signing, and access control) the model ensures transparency, traceability, and reproducibility while preserving loose coupling and autonomy between systems. The paper discusses architectural principles, implementation considerations, and comparisons with RESTful and broker-based integrations, highlighting both the advantages and trade-offs of adopting Git as a declarative communication substrate.