Performance Evaluation of Intent-Based Networking Scenarios: A GitOps and Nephio Approach

Abstract

GitOps has emerged as a foundational paradigm for managing cloud-native infrastructures by enabling declarative configuration, version-controlled state, and automated reconciliation between intents and runtime deployments. Despite its widespread adoption, the performance and scalability of GitOps tools in Intent-Based Networking (IBN) scenarios are insufficiently evaluated. This paper presents a reproducible, metric-driven benchmarking, assessing the latency and resource overheads of three widely used GitOps operators: Argo CD, Flux CD, and ConfigSync. We conduct controlled experiments under both single- and multi-intent scenarios, capturing key performance indicators such as latency and resource consumption. Our results highlight trade-offs between the tools in terms of determinism, resource efficiency, and responsiveness. We further investigate a realistic orchestration scenario, using Nephio as our orchestrator, to quantify the processing latency and overhead in declarative end-to-end deployment pipelines. Our findings can offer valuable insights for tool selection and optimisation in future autonomous network orchestration systems.