Series

GitOps with ArgoCD

Once you've got a cluster you understand, you want deployments that don't terrify you. This series covers GitOps from first principles through to running it at scale across multiple clusters and teams. ArgoCD is the tool, but the ideas apply everywhere.

  1. 1

    Part 1 — What is GitOps and why does it exist?

    If you’ve been running Kubernetes for a while, you’ve probably settled into a deployment workflow that looks something like this. A developer finishes a feature. CI builds and pushes a new image. Someone — maybe a…

    6 min read

  2. 2

    Part 2 — The four principles of GitOps

    GitOps gets thrown around a lot as a buzzword, which means it gets applied to a lot of things that aren’t quite it. “We store our manifests in Git” — not quite. “Our CI pipeline runs kubectl apply” — closer, but…

    8 min read

  3. 3

    Part 3 — ArgoCD: your first GitOps controller

    The last two posts covered the theory. GitOps is a good idea. The four principles make sense. Now let’s talk about the software that actually implements it. ArgoCD is the most widely used GitOps controller for…

    8 min read

  4. 4

    Part 4 — Structuring your Git repository

    Here’s a conversation that happens on almost every team adopting GitOps for the first time. You’ve got ArgoCD running, you’ve written your first Application, you’ve seen the sync work. Now someone asks: “where…

    8 min read

  5. 5

    Part 5 — Helm and Kustomize in a GitOps world

    By now you have a Git repo, ArgoCD watching it, and a folder structure that separates environments. The next problem is one that every team hits within the first week: your payments API in dev and your payments API…

    8 min read

  6. 6

    Part 6 — Secrets in a GitOps workflow

    Everything we’ve covered so far has a satisfying elegance to it. Desired state in Git. ArgoCD watching. Cluster reconciling. The whole system is auditable, reproducible, and self-healing. Then someone asks: “where do…

    9 min read

  7. 7

    Part 7 — Progressive delivery: beyond all-at-once deploys

    Rolling updates, which we covered back in the Kubernetes series, are a significant improvement over taking your service down to deploy a new version. But they have a blind spot: the moment the rollout completes, 100%…

    9 min read

  8. 8

    Part 8 — Running GitOps at scale: multi-cluster and multi-team

    Everything in this series so far has implicitly assumed a relatively simple setup: one team, one or a handful of clusters, one ArgoCD instance, a config repo with a reasonable number of applications. That setup works…

    10 min read