EA-Ops: Git-Native Architecture as Code for Continuous Enterprise Architecture Governance

Abstract

Enterprise architecture (EA) repositories frequently separate architecture models from the engineering workflow used to change software and infrastructure. This article presents EA-Ops, an open-source Git-native Enterprise Architecture-as-Code framework that represents architecture facts as YAML, validates typed relationships against an ArchiMate 3.2 profile, enforces organization-specific governance rules, performs graph-based change-impact analysis, and publishes human-facing reports and a static interactive portal from the same reviewed source. We evaluate EA-Ops with a reproducible GitHub Actions harness. Eight independently injected structural, semantic, and governance fault classes were executed across 30 trials each; all 240 trials matched ground truth exactly, with precision, recall, and $F_1$ of 1.000. Scalability experiments with 30 measured repetitions reached 50,000 objects and 100,000 relationships: median validation time was 52.582~s, median impact traversal was 627.000~ms, and peak resident-set size was 919.2~MB. A ten-scenario Metroville digital-permit reference architecture produced exact validation outcomes and exact impact-set agreement with an independent breadth-first-search oracle in every scenario. The configured 100,000-object end-to-end benchmark generated its model successfully but exceeded the 180-minute CI budget during the performance stage; no timing result is extrapolated. At 50,000 objects, Markdown report generation rather than semantic validation is the dominant scaling bottleneck. The results support Git-native continuous governance as a practical EA operating model at tens-of-thousands-of-object scale while defining clear limits and optimization targets for larger repositories.