What is the Argo project?
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has launched the Argo project to help build and manage continuous delivery workflows (CDs) at Kubernetes. It consists of four projects – Argo CD, Argo Workflows, Argo Rollouts and Argo Events.
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Argo CD
Argo CD is a continuous implementation tool (CD) for Kubernetes. It can download your updated code from Git repositories and then place it directly in your Kubernetes resources. The main advantage of the Argo CD is that it can help you manage application updates along with the infrastructure configuration through a single system.
Argo CD allows you to set up manual and automated application deployment in a Kubernetes cluster. It also allows you to set up automatic synchronization of the application status with the latest version of your declarative configuration. It supports web hooks that trigger actions in GitHub, Bitbucket and GitLab.
Argo CD provides a command line interface (CLI) and a web user interface that allows you to visualize deployment issues and detect and correct configuration changes. It includes security features such as Role-based access control (RBAC) Multiple Cluster and Single Input (SSO) management for GitHub, GitLab, Microsoft, OIDC, OAuth2, LinkedIn, SAML 2.0 and LDAP.
Slang workflows
Slang workflows is a workflow engine that is a natural container that Argo is implementing as a customized resource definition (CRD) in Kubernetes. You can use Argo Workflows to organize parallel tasks in Kubernetes. Allows you to define workflows that process each step as a container and run Kubernetes CI / CD pipelines.
You can use Argo Workflows to model a multi-stage workflow as a series of tasks or to capture dependencies between tasks with DAG graphics. It also allows you to easily perform intensive computational tasks for data processing or machine learning (ML).
Deployment of Argo
Argo Rollouts operates as a Kubernetes controller, providing advanced deployment functionality for Kubernetes, including canaries and blue-green deployments, canary analysis, and progressive delivery.
You can integrate Argo Rollouts with service network and input controllers. Once integrated, Rollouts can use its traffic targeting capabilities to gradually move traffic to newer versions during updates. It can also query metrics received from integrated vendors and interpret them to check KPIs and apply automatic reversals or promotions.
Slang events
Argo Events provides event-based dependency management features for Kubernetes. It can help you define several dependencies on different event sources, including webhook, schedules, s3 and streams.
After successfully resolving event dependencies, Argo Events can trigger Kubernetes objects. However, you cannot use Argo Events alone. Rather, you need to integrate this tool with a system that performs workflow steps, such as Argo Workflows.
GitOps with Kubernetes
GitOps is a methodology for declarative management of application development workflows. Allows you to describe applications and infrastructure declaratively and present their desired state using version control systems such as Git.
When you use GitOps, version control systems become the only source of truth for your applications. This allows you to easily deploy and return to Kubernetes. When a production problem occurs, you can use the version control system to quickly and reliably revert to a previous version of the infrastructure. Instead of complicated returns, you can use a simple Git return to restore the application to its previous state.
GitOps involves the use of a software agent that automatically obtains the Git status needed to match the platform status. As the status is constantly adjusted, changes made to the system must be reflected in Git and vice versa. This eliminates the need to use cluster credentials when making changes to the system.
Software agents can inform you when the desired state is not met and help you ensure that the system recovers. Software agents go beyond processing nodes or modules that fail – Kubernetes handles these tasks – to point out human error by acting as a feedback and control chain for operations.
Why is Argo an activating technology for GitOps?
Argo offers a variety of features that allow GitOps, including:
Continuous monitoring and synchronization
Argo uses Kubernetes manifestos to constantly monitor your Git repositories and check commitments. It proactively retrieves changes from repositories and synchronizes the changes with your cluster resources to match the state of the cluster configuration to the state described in Git.
This ability to monitor containers in Kubernetes clusters and synchronizing them with Git repositories helps to minimize or even eliminate configuration errors and deployment failures. Argo understands the history of cluster deployments and tracks asynchronous deployments to help avoid these deviations.
Efficiency and productivity
Argo provides an efficient workflow that allows developers to use familiar tools and processes to implement code. It helps avoid inconsistencies, improves system reliability, and provides automatic CD performance features to increase performance. In addition, it reduces the complexity of implementation and improves the transfer rate.
Progressive delivery
Argo offers features that allow progressive delivery options, such as blue / green and canary deployment. It allows developers to use automatic deployment to launch new features gradually and iteratively. You can apply GitOps workflows to incremental delivery processes and use Argo to ensure the process is safe and simple.
Download requests
GitOps relies on a download request process to introduce new versions of the configuration. It merges these versions with the main branch of the Git repository and automatically deploys new versions. Your Git repository stores the complete history of changes, including details of the environment during each phase of the process. The Argo CD can handle the second half of the GitOps process by checking that your new configuration has been successfully deployed in the cluster.
Deployments
Argo implements releases as custom Kubernetes resource definitions (CRD), acting as an implementation object that offers enhanced functionality. It integrates with Argo CD to help facilitate deployment strategies using GitOps to launch CI / CD pipelines.
Conclusion
Argo is a powerful instrument that is a natural extension of the mid-Kubernetes. Because it is so familiar to existing Kubernetes users, it makes it extremely easy to adopt GitOps. You can use Argo to instantly reap the benefits of GitOps in existing Kubernetes clusters:
- Continuous synchronization between Git storage and cluster status
- Automate workflows for software delivery
- Progressive delivery, allowing models such as blue / green and canary
- Use Git download requests to trigger the deployment of new versions
I suggest you take Argo and try it yourself – this is the fastest way for your team to become the next unicorn of GitOps.
