Applying GitOps Principles Using Argo CD

Introduction

Argo CD describes itself as “a declarative, GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes.” That could be considered misleading. Argo CD is not a “continuous delivery tool.” It needs more to be able to claim that.

Continuous delivery (CD) is the ability to deploy changes to production as quickly as possible, without sacrificing quality and security. On the surface, it might sound like a tool that can deploy changes to production as a CD tool, but that's not the case. Continuous delivery is about automating all the steps from a push to a code repository all the way until a release is deployed to production. As such, Argo CD doesn't fit that description. Here's what we want to achieve from any CI/CD tool.

We wanted to get all this out of the way right away so there are no false expectations.

So, let's change the official description of Argo CD to a “declarative GitOps deployment tool for Kubernetes.”

Our initial negativity shouldn't diminish the value of Argo CD. It's one of the best, if not the best tool we have today to deploy applications inside Kubernetes clusters. It's based on GitOps principles, and it's a perfect fit to be a part of continuous delivery pipelines. It provides all the building blocks we might need if we would like to adopt GitOps principles for deployments and inject them inside the process of application lifecycle management.

Now, let's give a different explanation of what Argo CD is.

Argo CD is a tool that helps us forget the existence of kubectl apply, helm install, and similar commands. It's a mechanism that allows us to focus on defining the desired state of our environments and pushing definitions to Git. It's ...