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

Service accounts

Service accounts are the accounts we use for authenticating automations such as CI/CD pipelines to the system. They should not be tied to a user because we don’t want our pipelines to start failing if we disable that user, or if we restrict its rights. Service accounts should have strict access control and should not be allowed to do more than what is required by the pipeline, while a real user will probably need to have access to a larger variety of resources.

There are two ways to create service accounts in Argo CD: one is with local users (for which we only use apiKey and remove the login part) and the other is to use project roles and have tokens assigned for those roles.

Local service accounts

We are now going to create a separate local account that only has the apiKey functionality specified. This way, the user doesn’t have a password for the UI or the CLI and access can be accomplished only after we generate an API key for it (which gives...