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.

The scope of the Sixth-Generation Self-Organized Networks (6G-SON) advances its predecessor's capability towards agility, flexibility, and adaptability. On-demand overlay networking technologies have shown a prominent maturity while coping with the rising complexity and scale of enterprise, service provider, and data centre networks. The Software-Defined Networking paradigm has recently offered Model Driven Programmability, minimizing network management complexity through automation and orchestration. However, leveraging Machine Learning-driven network optimization, a.k.a. Knowledge-Defined Networking (KDN), has still been a domain of interest for the Network Softwarization research community. In this article, we propose Intelligent Routing as a Service (iRaaS) architecture as an application layer cognitive routing framework for KDNs. iRaaS offers routing logic customization (i.e., customizing metric function and path-finding algorithm) and provides an option to include heuristic parameters from trained models as a part of the metric calculation. iRaaS sits on the application plane above the knowledge plane in a KDN stack, thus providing platform- and vendor-agnostic coupling with existing network infrastructures. This article covers the scope of iRaaS by using reliability as a heuristic for standard path-discovery algorithms, e.g., Shortest Path First (SPF) and Diffusion Update algorithm (DUAL), along with the architectural specification. We validate our approach through a Proof-of-Concept deployment.