From open-source Argo CD to Akuity:
Mastery Modernizes GitOps at
40,000-App Scale

Mastery gained time back and instant performance with a
seamless migration

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Industry:

Logistics Technology / SaaS

Company size:

201-500

Location:

Chicago, IL, USA

140+ HOURS SAVED PER QUARTER

Engineering time reclaimed from Argo maintenance

40K Applications / 50+ Clusters

Centrally managed through Akuity's control plane

Company Overview

Mastery Logistics Systems builds enterprise-grade logistics software that helps large shippers and carriers modernize how freight moves across global supply chains. Founded by industry veterans, Mastery delivers a unified logistics management platform that brings automation, visibility, and control to complex shipping operations.

How Mastery uses Akuity

Mastery uses Akuity’s managed Argo CD control plane to operate more than 50 Kubernetes clusters and tens of thousands of applications. Through Akuity’s agent-based architecture, the team manages all environments centrally from a single control plane that connects securely to remote clusters without deploying or maintaining separate Argo CD instances in each one. The team also uses Akuity’s Terraform provider to define and manage configuration as code, keeping workflows consistent across environments.

The Challenge

As Mastery’s platform grew, its infrastructure scaled to more than 50 clusters and tens of thousands of applications. Running open-source Argo CD at that size introduced new performance and operational challenges.

The team operated several self-managed Argo CD instances with sharded controllers, high compute consumption, and increasing maintenance effort. As application counts rose, the Argo CD UI slowed, and engineers frequently had to troubleshoot performance issues or handle upgrades manually.

Over time, this work began to consume a significant share of engineering capacity. Cloud Engineering and DevOps were spending hundreds of hours each quarter maintaining infrastructure instead of focusing on new initiatives.

“We love open source Argo CD, but at our scale it became expensive in time and compute.”

— Brett Nugent, Cloud Engineering Manager, Mastery Logistics

The Solution

Mastery adopted the Akuity Platform to simplify Argo CD operations and improve performance without re-architecting its workflows.

With Akuity’s managed control plane and agent-based model, the team now manages all environments centrally without hosting Argo CD inside customer clusters. Akuity simplifies ongoing management, with upgrades, tuning, and performance checks accessible through an intuitive interface. Upgrades can be completed in a single click, while Mastery continues to manage its deployment automation through Terraform.

The migration was seamless and low-risk. Mastery transitioned all environments to Akuity in just a few hours, migrating thousands of applications per environment without downtime or re-architecting existing workflows. The process was tightly coordinated across the Mastery and Akuity teams and smooth end-to-end.

“Now Argo performs the way we always wanted it to — fast, responsive, and effortless to manage.”

— Brett Nugent, Mastery

The Results

After adopting Akuity, Mastery saw immediate improvements in UI responsiveness, deployment speed, and overall developer experience.

Pagination and performance issues disappeared, freeing engineers from manual maintenance and daily troubleshooting. Argo-related escalations dropped significantly, and the Cloud Engineering team regained meaningful time for higher-value work.

“The Akuity UI is performant and responsive — engineers aren’t stuck waiting for pages to load or relying on Argo-side workarounds.” — Brett Nugent, Mastery

“Every new customer brings more work, but not more headaches. Akuity gave us the ability to do more with less.”

— Kyle Titus, AVP IT Operations & Security

Today, Mastery operates 40,000+ applications across 50+ clusters on the Akuity Platform with improved performance, less overhead, and confidence to scale.

Time Back, Performance Up

By moving from open-source Argo CD to the Akuity Platform, Mastery simplified operations, improved performance, and gave valuable time back to its engineering teams. Deployments now run faster, visibility is instant, and the Cloud Engineering team no longer spends cycles maintaining Argo at scale. With the Akuity Platform, Mastery can continue growing its customer base confidently without increasing overhead or complexity.