Argo CD workshop

Table of content

1. Overview
2. Installation
3. Basic usage
4. Organization workflow integration
5. Application auto syncing

Overview

Argo CD is a new, lighweight Kubernetes-native continuous delivery (CD) system. "Kubernetes-native" means:

1. Ideology - Argo CD implements GitOps paradigm for CD. The main point - Git is our single source of true. After we push our app's config changes into the app config repo - argocd syncs the app state with the changes. I.e. our changes are declarative.
2. Implementation - Argo CD is built solely from the Kubernetes entities - custom resource definitions (CRD), a controller to process the CRDs, RBAC policies to organize security etc.

Version

Current Argo CD version is 0.12.3 Version 1.0.0-rc3 is available The Argo CD's roadmanp is here

Argo CD architecture

Argo CD's Components

1. API server

• application management and status reporting
• invoking of application operations (e.g. sync, rollback, user-defined actions)
• credential management
• auth/authz management
• listener/forwarder for Git webhook events

2. Application Controller

• adjusts the application's actual state with the desired target one

3. Repository Server

• maintains a local cache of the Git repository

4. Argo CD Client

• a CLI application to interact with the argocd server

5. SSO adapter

• implements integrations with external SSO providers (Github, Google Cloud, LDAP etc.)

6. Cache

• a Redis instance that caches frequently accessed objects

Features

• Supports both the pull and the push-based GitOps models to sync target environments with desired application state.

• Multiple manifests template formats: Helm, Kustomize, Ksonnet/Jsonnet or plain YAML manifests.

• Git branch tracking or tag/commit pinning.

• App synchronization: manual or automated.

• Rollback to any application state committed in the git repository.

• Continuous monitoring of deployed applications.

• Web console with visualized app's deployment scheme, logs and health statuses.

• Argo CD is agnostic to your CI system, and provides gRPC/REST/CLI to integrate with your CI of choice.

• SSO Integration (OIDC, LDAP, GitHub).

• Webhook integration (GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket).

• Complex application rollouts (e.g., canary upgrades, blue/green) via PreSync/Sync/PostSync hooks