Argo Graduation Day!

Good news, everyone! The Argo Project has reached the “Graduated” status with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. This is a significant event and an essential milestone in Argo’s success story. Many thanks go to the community for the support in helping project maintainers achieve this landmark!

In order to be considered for graduation, Argo went through a rigorous review process with the CNCF. Maintainers worked hard with the foundation's Technical Oversight Committee to review and improve the project in various areas, including security best practices, governance model, and testing framework. During the process, Argo maintainers invested an endless number of hours in tightening the security of all four projects, streamlining our security processes, conducting security audits, and addressing the audit findings.

Today we are proud to say that the project has adopted a governance model that ensures a diversity of contributors, embraces openness, and cannot be controlled by any single company or person. Thanks to project stability and flawless security processes, hundreds of companies trust Argo to manage the most critical areas of their infrastructure.

Argo's CNCF graduation marks the recognition of the project's progress and the beginning of a completely new journey!

Akuity and Argo

The graduation is an exciting event for the whole Argo community, but especially for the maintainers since we’ve worked hard to make this happen. However, for the Akuity team, this event is also very personal or even touching. The reason is that Akuity's founders are engineers who created the project.

Working on Argo became a pivoting moment in our careers. We fell in love with DevOps, and became true containerization believers and cloud-native adepts. This fueled our passion to build a product that provides the perfect developer experience. During this journey, we went through various ups and downs, celebrated little victories, reflected on failures, and learned a lot.

For each of us, Argo became an opportunity to work on something significant, but it did require stepping out of our comfort zone. Being engineers to the marrow, we’ve suddenly found out that writing code is not enough to make an open source project successful. We had to start wearing multiple hats and quickly learn new skills, from writing blogs to publicly speaking at Kubecon and even publishing a book!

The Argo graduation is an excellent testimony to all those efforts! The question is, what’s next? This is a serious question since it is difficult to find a more significant milestone for a cloud native open source project. However, we think graduation is just the beginning, and to let you know why we need to answer the question: “Why was Argo created in the first place?”.

Why Was Argo Created?

It might come as a surprise, but Argo was not meant to help with Kubernetes management using GitOps, it was not created to orchestrate batch processing on Kubernetes, and in fact, it was not about Kubernetes at all.

Argo was created while our team was a part of a company called Applatix Inc. The company had the vision to create a platform for developing and running applications in the cloud. Back in 2016, it was clear that containerization and cloud infrastructure are the future. However, we did not know how to fully get there yet.

Lessons Learned

While working on the first version of Argo, we’ve learned three crucial lessons:

It is impossible to independently create a perfect DevOps platform that fits everyone's needs.

DevOps space is constantly growing and changing. An idea that works perfectly well today, might become irrelevant tomorrow. In this case, the only solution might be to start all over again.

Like with solving any other problem, we can come close to a perfect DevOps platform, step by step.

Step by step, or we should rather say layer by layer. Kubernetes, on top of public cloud and containers, became a foundational layer that moved the whole industry light years ahead. We believe consistent evolution will get us much farther than any attempts to reinvent the wheel.

Open Source is the most effective way to get there.

This lesson is listed last but probably is the most important one. The results of open sourcing Argo are nothing but incredible. Constant feedback loop supported by the community became the key to the project's success.

What’s Next?

So back to the question - “what’s next?”. The Akuity team stays committed to the goal of creating the perfect DevOps platform. We believe we still have a long way to go with thousands of use cases we have not even considered yet. Just like Kubernetes, Argo became a layer. This layer is focused on application delivery and provides building blocks for use cases such as progressive delivery, batch processing, and event handling, all under control of a powerful GitOps-based management system.

Akuity, like no other company, is perfectly positioned to continue expanding the Argo ecosystem itself as well as providing more opinionated blocks on top of Argo. The Akuity Platform, the first product announced by our company, brings cloud-managed Argo CD enhanced with unique, more scalable, secure architecture and packaged with must-have enterprise features.

The next step is to build the next layer of innovation. We are aiming to push application delivery tools one step forward and bridge the gap between GitOps and multi-step processes needed to satisfy compliance and testing requirements.

We have not changed our opinion regarding how innovation should be done: it should be open-sourced and developed in tight collaboration with the community. Stay tuned, and look forward to an open-source Akuity project that brings Kubernetes and Argo to the next level.

Alexander Matyushentsev, Hong Wang, Jesse Suen