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

What is GitOps Engine?

The Argo CD team announced the implementation of GitOps Engine a few years back. Different GitOps operators in the industry address several different use cases but they are all mostly a similar set of core features. Based on this, the Argo CD team had an idea to build a reusable library that implements the core GitOps principles. The core features of GitOps Engine are the following:

  • A cache
  • Diffing and reconciliation
  • Health assessment
  • Synchronization
  • Engine

Argo CD is already updated and uses GitOps Engine and, in parallel, still keeps the enterprise features so it can bring the GitOps power to enterprise organizations too. The features that Argo CD delivers to GitOps as a service to large enterprises and that are not part of GitOps Engine are the following:

  • Single sign-on integration
  • Role-based access control
  • Custom resource definitions abstractions such as Application and Project, which we have already discussed...