Akuity December 2023 Update

It's been a while since we shared any Akuity Platform updates, so here's a fresh blog post about the platform's new functionalities and improvements added during the last few months.

Full Declarative Management

The entire configuration of Argo CD instances on the Akuity Platform, including the clusters, Applications and ApplicationSets, and config management plugins, can now be managed declaratively using manifests and the akuity CLI (or API). You don't have to manage the underlying infrastructure when the entire configuration is declarative and hosted for you!

Try it out for yourself using our example on GitHub: https://github.com/akuity/declarative-example

Additional SSO Providers Support

The Akuity Platform portal now supports Google, SAML, and OIDC identity providers in addition to Okta and Azure. In addition, using a custom SSO provider to access the Akuity Platform is now available.

UI Wizard For Agent Manifests Customizations

To complement the generic YAML editor, the Akuity Platform now provides a UI wizard for the most common Akuity Agent manifest customizations, such as workload resource requests, environment variables, and log levels. Changes made in the wizard are immediately reflected in the YAML editor, providing clarity on the effect of each change.

Audit Log Improvements

The audit log component received several improvements, including more details in audit log events. Each entry now includes the Kubernetes resource's group and kind, Git revision in sync events, and proper visualization of API key actors.

In addition to the existing organization and application-level audit logs, the audit log is now available in each Argo CD instance dashboard.

AI Assistant Improvements

The AI assistant prompts have been fine-tuned to provide more valuable answers. The AI assistant user interface has been improved to be compatible with Argo CD dark mode. Users can now provide feedback about conversations to power further improvements.

Repo Server Delegate Improvements

The Repo Server Delegate is a feature that allows "delegating" Git operations to a particular cluster, a super handy feature when working with self-hosted private Git servers.

The implementation has been significantly improved to provide better performance and reliability with much less traffic between managed clusters and the control plane. For large-scale Argo CD users, this will greatly reduce the pressure put on the source Git (or Helm) server used by Applications.

Settings Enhancements

The Akuity Platform user interface allows for managing additional Argo CD instance settings, including the expiration time for SSO tokens, egress settings for control plane components, and improved validation of RBAC policies.

Hosted Configurations

Specific resources related to the configuration of Argo CD can be deployed to the Akuity Platform control plane. In this release, we've expanded the resource list to include config management plugins and secrets for ApplicationSet generators (e.g. Git credentials for the SCM generator). Additionally, we've enabled this functionality by default to streamline user experience.

Try it Out

To try out all the new features, log in to your user account or start a free trial and have a fully-managed instance of Argo CD in minutes.

If you want to learn how to manage the deployment of the Helm charts in a declarative fashion using Argo CD and Github, take a look at our tutorial.

Help and Support

If you want any insights on where to start with Akuity or Argo CD, please reach out to me (Nicholas Morey) on the the CNCF Slack. You can find me on the #argo-* channels, and don't hesitate to send me a direct message.

You can also schedule a technical demo with our team or go through the “Getting started” manual on the Akuity Documentation website.

We also invite you to check out our free course on GitOps and Continuous Delivery. Developed by the founders of the Argo Project, this course offers hands-on experience in implementing these practices with Argo CD.