Most Kubernetes platforms and GitOps tools are designed for organizations operating between 10 and 300 clusters.

But a different category begins when organizations operate between 1,000 and 10,000 clusters across edge, retail, telecom, IoT, supermarkets, or franchise environments. At this scale, many GitOps architectures and tools start to break down, even with HA setups and extensive tuning.

Public scaling data at this level is limited because these environments are rare, expensive, and difficult to reproduce realistically.

In this talk, we share how we approached predicting the operation of 15,000+ Kubernetes clusters based on a real-world customer requirement. Using large-scale GitOps load testing in a hub-and-spoke architecture, we explored scaling limits, bottlenecks, infrastructure costs, and operational trade-offs within a budget of roughly €100,000.

The session also covers what our findings may tell us about the future of GitOps at extreme scale with Argo CD and Sveltos.