ArgoCon 2021 Akuity Team Recap

We just concluded the inaugural ArgoCon! We'd like to share some impressive numbers from this conference and recap on the four sessions from the Akuity team.

The Numbers

First, let's look at some numbers that came out from this conference.

• 3,893 registrants with 1,800 unique attendees over the day from 90 countries and more than 1500 companies.
• 20 sessions from 25 speakers, including 4 sessions from Akuity team.
• 6,200+ live session views and 2,600+ on demand views across all talks.
• 8 corporate sponsors.

These are really impressive numbers and we just got started for this first-ever Argo conference!

We are proud to be one of the diamond sponsors of ArgoCon and 4 of the talks were given by our team members at Akuity! s Our team consists of the founding members and core maintainers of Argo. We've been involved in every perspective of the Argo projects and we will invest in what’s needed to foster the project’s growth. This includes continuing our contributions to the project, supporting users with their issues, facilitating discussions and meetings, and promoting Argo every chance we get. If this interests you, please reach out and we are actively hiring!

The Argo community is growing fast and has been leading the chart with a large number of open source contributors and development activities. Argo is ranked as one of the top projects among all the CNCF projects in terms of development velocity, based on activities on GitHub commits/PRs/issues (see the screenshot below).

Who's excited for the upcoming ArgoCon 2022? Be on the lookout for the ArgoCon 2022 CFP! In addition, follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter to stay tuned for the latest news and development of Argo!

Akuity Talks Recap

Argo: The Present, Past, and Future

Speakers:

• Kelsey Hightower - Principal Engineer at Google Cloud Platform
• Hong Wang - Founder and CEO at Akuity

Hong and Kelsey takes a deep-dive into the Argo project and explores how we got here, and where we’re going.

Recording: https://youtu.be/76iUpAWakIM

How Scalable is Argo-Rollouts: A Cloud Operator’s Perspective

Speakers:

• Hui Kang - Platform Engineer at Salesforce
• Jesse Suen - Argo Project Lead, Co-founder and CTO at Akuity

In this talk, Argo Rollouts maintainers Jesse Suen and Hui Kang speak about the performance and scalability testing they conducted on Argo Rollouts when compared against the native Kubernetes Deployment kind. The talk begins with some background on Argo Rollouts architecture. It discusses the methodology of the experiments, and the final results. The results uncovered some bottlenecks which were subsequenltly fixed bringing the performance back on par with Deployments.

Recording: https://youtu.be/rCEhxJ2NSTI

Bridging into Python Ecosystem with Cloud-Native Distributed Machine Learning Pipelines

Speaker: Yuan Tang - Founding Engineer at Akuity

In this talk, Yuan provides an overview of the Python scientific system, machine learning frameworks, and workflow orchestration tools. He also presents various best practices and challenges on building large, efficient, scalable, and reliable distributed machine learning pipelines using cloud-native technologies such as Argo Workflows and Kubeflow as well as how they fit into Python ecosystem with cutting-edge distributed machine learning frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch.

Recording: https://youtu.be/muM7IErh1S0

Argo Maintainer Updates

Speakers:

• Jesse Suen - Argo Project Lead, Co-founder and CTO at Akuity
• Alex Collins - Argo Project Lead, Principal Software Engineer at Intuit

A lot has happened with the Argo project in 2021 and there are some impressive stats to back that up:

Argo CD

• 262 contributors
• 175 features, 408 bug fixes
• 896 commits
• 7,778 stars (68% YoY)
• 38k monthly visitors (120% YoY)

Argo Rollouts

• 60 contributors
• 63 features, 119 bug fixes
• 263 commits
• 1,251 stars (81% YoY)
• 5k monthly visitors (100% YoY)

Argo Events

• 63 contributors
• 42 new features, 71 bug fixes
• 189 commits
• 1,251 stars (30% YoY)
• 4k monthly visitors

Argo Workflows

• 200 contributors
• 167 new features
• 508 bug fixes
• 954 commits
• 9,921 stars
• 44k monthly visitors

But of course the most important statistic of all, is that 500 Argo plushies were delivered at KubeCon. To see the recap, as well as what's in store for 2022, watch the recordings of the maintainers updates:

• Argo CD and Rollouts: https://youtu.be/wn6OOLoHvQg
• Argo Workflows and Events: https://youtu.be/FUekn40l9-A

Additional Resources

You can find all the past and upcoming talks at various conferences from our team here. If you missed any of the ArgoCon sessions, all the recordings are available on YouTube!

In addition, there's also a curated list of projects and resources related to Argo if you'd like to learn more about the Argo core projects and ecosystem projects.

Join our growing Argo community by finding us at regular community meetings, conferences, and Slack!