KubeCon EU 2022 - Akuity Team Recap

We just came back from Valencia, Spain, where we attended KubeCon, and wanted to share the Argo and Cloud-Native energy we brought back home with us.

Argo Project Meeting

Our KubeCon experience started pretty early - the Akuity representation was there to join the Argo Project Meeting and talk to users and contributors in an informal atmosphere. You can imagine the smiles on our faces when just 10 minutes before the talk the whole room was full with people grasping additional chairs from the hallway and crowding close to the entry just to listen to the talk delivered by Alexander Matyushentsev - one of Argo's originators and currently the Co-Founder and Chief Architect at Akuity.

Argo CD 2.4

Alex delivered a talk about the latest release candidate of Argo CD which includes such features as:

• Web Terminal In Argo CD UI
• Access Control For Pod Logs & Web Terminal
• OpenTelemetry Tracing Integration
• Power PC and IBM Z Support

You can learn more about the upcoming Argo CD release from the official Argo Project Blog.

Argo CD 2.5+ and Beyond

Next up, Alex discussed the upcoming plans for the next releases underlining the most-wanted features that the contributor community would like to deliver during the upcoming months.

Applications With Multiple Sources

This feature will enable deploying applications combined from multiple Helm Charts (remote Kustomize bases, git repos with YAML, etc.) as well as placing value files of Helm charts located in predefined remote repositories. The main motivation behind this proposal is to allow users to create an application using services that are stored in various sources.

For more info and providing feedback, please view the "Multiple Sources for application" GitHub issue.

Config Management Tools V2

Config Management Plugins allow Argo CD administrators to define custom manifest generation tooling. Currently, the only existing way for users to parameterize manifest generation is with environment variables. The suggested change will allow a plugin to "announce" acceptable parameters for an Application. It will also allow the plugin to consume parameters once the user has set them.

This in return will unblock the support of dozens of config management tools and create smaller Argo CD images.

For more info and providing feedback, please view the "Parameterized Config Management Plugins GitHub issue"

ApplicationSet First Class Support

This enhancement has started as an experiment as a part of Argo Labs and received great feedback from the community. The next step is to extend Argo CD API & UI to allow users to manage Applications Sets imperatively.

Secrets In Application Parameters

Ability to use secrets with Application parameters to leverage config management tools parameters and customize generated manifests is something that is also on the roadmap.

For more info and providing feedback, please view the "Add support for secrets in Application parameters" GitHub issue.

It was a busy Monday for all the people involved, but at the same time, it has given all of us extreme pleasure to talk to the community and hear how Argo makes their work easier and less stressful.

Akuity Talks Recap

Argo’s Vibrant Ecosystem and Community

The attendance at this talk has gone beyond our expectations. The big auditorium room was fully packed 10 minutes before the talk and many people stood at the steps or created long lines just to hear what Argo maintainers have to say.

Speakers: Alexander Matyushentsev, Akuity; Alex Collins, Intuit, Dan Garfield, Codefresh

Video: Argo’s Vibrant Ecosystem and Community - Alex Collins, Alexander Matyushentsev & Dan Garfield

"Argo CD is the most popular Kubernetes GitOps application delivery tool. Argo Workflows is the most popular Kubernetes workflow execution platform. I bet you know about the core Argo projects, but what about the massive rapidly growing ecosystem of projects around them? Have you heard of Argo Events, Argo Rollouts, ApplicationSet, Argo CD Image Updater, Argo CD Vault Plugin, Argo CD Autopilot, Hera Workflows? What about tools such as Kubeflow Pipelines, Katib, SQL Flow, Couler, and Ploomber?. In this session, you’ll learn not just about the core Argo projects, but also get the highlights from several ecosystem projects with demos and best practices. You can address many more use cases by teaming them up with each other."

TikTok’s Story: How To Manage a Thousand Applications on Edge With Argo CD

Talk was delivered by Akuity CTO Jesse Suen and Qingkun Li, Tech Lead at Bytedance.

Speakers: Jesse Suen, Akuity; Qingkun Li, TikTok / Bytedance Inc.

Video: TikTok’s Story: How To Manage a Thousand Applications on Edge With Argo CD - Qingkun Li & Jesse Suen

Presentation: Available on the KubeCon Website

"This talk will share a case study of how TikTok manages its global edge clusters with Kubernetes and operates continuous delivery with Argo CD concluding with a demo. The talk will also dive into the scalability challenges faced by Tiktok to manage edge services using Argo CD (with ~100 edge clusters, ~150k CPUs and ~3000 applications), as well as how the Argo community plans to address them in future. TikTok operates a large network of Kubernetes edge clusters around the world, hosting apps such as Tiktok, live and gaming, using cache and traffic acceleration services offered at our edge clusters. The challenge arises when it comes to the deployment management of those edge services on hundreds of edge clusters. Normally, an edge service shares a lot of common configurations when deployed globally, but still has cluster-specific configurations (e.g. resource quota, service hostname, etc.). From this talk, people will learn how to deploy and manage such kind of services using Argo CD."

Key Takeout(s)

If we could have one takeout from the entire conference it would be "Everyone uses Argo in production!" We knew about the stats from the latest CNCF Report, but speaking to actual people from all over the world who want to share their satisfaction with Argo as well to enjoy a photo opportunity with one of the Argo creators, Akuity's Co-Founder, and our great colleague, Alexander Matyushentsev, felt "a bit abstract" in a very positive way 😌

Waiting for my plane back to Poland I've overheard one chat at the airport from fellow "Kubeconers" (or "Kubecons"? 😂 ) - one of them congratulated another on the talk he had delivered and said:

"If I could have only one takeout from this conference it would be that GitOps is here to stay and it's the only way to go".

More Resources

You can find all the past and upcoming talks at various conferences from our team here.

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!

Also, remember about the upcoming #ArgoCon 2022 in September. We hope to see you there!