Book Image

Argo CD in Practice

By : Liviu Costea, Spiros Economakis
Book Image

Argo CD in Practice

By: Liviu Costea, Spiros Economakis

Overview of this book

GitOps follows the practices of infrastructure as code (IaC), allowing developers to use their day-to-day tools and practices such as source control and pull requests to manage apps. With this book, you’ll understand how to apply GitOps bootstrap clusters in a repeatable manner, build CD pipelines for cloud-native apps running on Kubernetes, and minimize the failure of deployments. You’ll start by installing Argo CD in a cluster, setting up user access using single sign-on, performing declarative configuration changes, and enabling observability and disaster recovery. Once you have a production-ready setup of Argo CD, you’ll explore how CD pipelines can be built using the pull method, how that increases security, and how the reconciliation process occurs when multi-cluster scenarios are involved. Next, you’ll go through the common troubleshooting scenarios, from installation to day-to-day operations, and learn how performance can be improved. Later, you’ll explore the tools that can be used to parse the YAML you write for deploying apps. You can then check if it is valid for new versions of Kubernetes, verify if it has any security or compliance misconfigurations, and that it follows the best practices for cloud-native apps running on Kubernetes. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to build a real-world CD pipeline using Argo CD.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Part 1: The Fundamentals of GitOps and Argo CD
4
Part 2: Argo CD as a Site Reliability Engineer
7
Part 3: Argo CD in Production

Working with templating options

We want to take a look at the main YAML templating options, Helm and Kustomize, and how you can get the best out of them when used with Argo CD. We are not going to introduce how these work as we expect that you have some knowledge of these tools. If you are not familiar with them, please follow their official guides—for Helm, we have https://helm.sh/docs/intro/quickstart/, and for Kustomize, there is https://kubectl.docs.kubernetes.io/guides/. Instead, we will be focusing on how you can generate manifests from templates in the same way as done by Argo CD.

Helm

Helm is probably the most used templating option for Kubernetes manifests. It is very popular and widely adopted, so you will probably deploy most of your applications using Helm charts. The easiest way to start installing Helm charts into a cluster is to use the native declarative support of Argo CD applications. We can see how we will be able to deploy a Traefik chart with this...