45 minutes to one minute: how we shrunk image deployment time

The report describes how Expel replaced Flux v1’s image auto-update with a custom, event-driven image-updater service to accelerate deployments and increase observability in their GitOps workflow, detailing a server+syncer design that performs regex-based YAML/jsonnet updates via keyword comments, batches changes, and provides metrics/tracing and structured logs. The result reduced image update latency from up to 45 minutes to roughly a minute within a ~7-minute release path, added native jsonnet support, and outlines future plans to adopt ArgoCD, introduce a CLI, switch to PR-based updates, and integrate Argo Rollouts for automated rollback.