Exploring the Argo Project with Regina Voloshin and Carlos Santana – KubeCon Europe 2025

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimel. We're back here at CubeCon covering, uh, day two of the, uh, of the main expo floor open.

Um, you know, one of the things that's great about CubeCon is it's not just Cube. It's not just Kubernetes. It's actually Cloud Native Con.

And there are 200 something, uh, projects now in, in the Cloud CNCF universe, and many of 'em, look, look, they're not all equal. Some are bigger than others. That's the way of the world, but many of them have their own kind of meeting days on, on, like I used to call it zero day.

I know they don't call it zero day anymore, but it was Tuesday this week. Um, one of the biggest projects, and I forget now if it's the third or fourth, right? Third biggest project in CNCF is, um, Argo.

Now, I gotta admit, I know Argo was before Code Freshs was the, uh, Acquired by Octopus. Octopus, so the CTO, but then I think he became Chief Open Source officer was Dan Garfield. That's right.

My manager and dad, first time I met Dan was at a, a CloudBees Jenkins community event in Nice France 20 17, 20 16. Long time. Okay.

Well, before there was an Argo. Yeah. Yeah.

And, uh, so I've watched Argo grow from just a little pure, uh, you know, a little, just a, a little project into GI ops, right. It kind of be, it really became GI Ops, if you will, and then blown up into, you know, what it is today, the third biggest project at CNCF. So I'm really happy to have two folks from the, uh, Argo project with us today.

We have Carlos Santana. Yep. That was the easiest name I've had to remember all week.

Carlos, welcome. Thank you. And then we have Reggie.

And Reggie, I'm gonna mess up your last name. I VO Ian Ocion. Is that it?

Ocion VE lotion. And, uh, Reggie is, uh, with Octopus Deploy. Yes, yes.

Who I guess still have a lot of, of the, uh, maintainers in code from the old code fresh days. Yes. We're maintaining, uh, active maintainers in Argo City.

Yeah. Yep. Yes.

So let's start off with Carlos. Reggie. What are your roles within the community, within the project?

Go ahead. Okay. So, uh, I'm an open source software tech lead at, uh, octopus Deploy.

And, uh, I am an Argo CD maintainer, which means that, uh, I'm contributing code to Argo CD. And, uh, I'm also enabling, uh, other contributors by, uh, reviewing their pole request. Uh, so, uh, speaking at, uh, Argo Con conferences and, uh, involved, uh, in the community.

So you are, you're in up to your ears in, into Argo, basically. Yeah. Yes.

Hey Carlos, how about you? So I'm the Sik lead for Scalability is a interest rate group of, uh, working with end users that want to talk about the scalability and the performance of the Argo projects. And, uh, Argo CD is one of the main projects that a lot of end users are having, um, questions about how to tune it, how to run it at scale in enterprises.

So we form a group where we all come together, uh, to discuss how to work with issues and also review the code that is applicable to performance. Excellent. So Reggie, our audience is pretty tech savvy.

They're DevOps people, cloud native platform engineers, cyber. Many, many of them are familiar with Argo, but there are some who are not. Right.

They may be hearing the name Argo for the first time. How would you describe Argo, the ar? What does Argo do?

How would you describe it to the audience? Yeah, So when people are delivering software, delivering application software and wanted to, uh, deploy to Kubernetes, then there are the traditional, uh, continuous, uh, deployment pipelines. And then what, uh, uh, replaced, this is basically a methodology that's called GitHubs.

And with this methodology, developers interact mostly with Git and then they store their configurations in Git. And then we have a GitHubs engine, which is Argo CD. And then Argo CD would look at this configuration and would apply it automatically to the cluster instead of the developers having to do that.

And, uh, Argo City also would watch the cluster and identify if there were manual changes that happened, and then it would go and just redeploy this configuration that was in gi, which is called the source of truth. Got it. Carlos, what do you think about that?

You agree? Want add Anything? Yeah.

So one, one thing for end users to know when you talk about Argo. Argo is a big project composed of many sub projects. So we have the Argo CD, which Regina explained, but we have other projects like Argo Workflows, Argo events, and, uh, we added Argo Helm ar Argo allowed, And Argo rollouts, which is for, uh, rolling out, uh, changes.

But today we're concentrating on Argo CD because we have a big release that we just recently did. Um, and a lot of people use GitHubs in terms of the practice, but, uh, Argo CD is, um, is is the biggest project that implements that practice at scale. And it's using the enterprise.

It's just everywhere. Excellent. You know, I didn't realize they're all, it's funny how it's taken on a, that was a life of its own right from that little project that I first remembered.

Um, you mentioned the new release of Argo CD. Yes. What's, what's, what's new in the release?

What's, what's the big, you know, story with the release? So, uh, I think that, uh, this release is actually a couple of, uh, big news for the community. The first big news is that on the one hand, it is a major release and, uh, it is the first, uh, major release, uh, uh, in the last, uh, couple of years.

But on the other hand, upgrading to this release is almost as easy to upgrading to a new minor release. So this is one thing that I think is, uh, really exciting for the community. And the other thing is that in this release we are kind of celebrating some, uh, high maturity level that Argo City has reached.

And when I say this, uh, new high maturity level, I mean that in this release we have gathered community feedback about the different, uh, configurations that community performs in order to make Argo CD more scalable and more performance. And then we took this feedback and we incorporated it into this release so that all the users can benefit from Argo CD that is more performance and that is also more scalable. Excellent.

Do you wanna add something else? Yeah. 0.

0 happened four years ago in 2021. So for the last four years, big one, we have been increasing the number of features that we have to Argo CD without breaking any API comp capabilities. Any and no, no removing anything from Argo CD.

But we have been deprecated API saying this is an API you should stop using, but we're not going to remove it because we don't want to break so many industries using the software at scale in critical environments. 0 15 releases already. 0 is where we have a chance to have a signal to the community saying, Hey, it's, it's about time to start using the new APIs.

We're going to remove the ones that are deprecated, and at the same time changing some of the defaults out of the box. 'cause when we have users suggesting different changes on the default, the defaults, it affects everyone that is using it. 'cause a lot of people use the defaults out of the box Sure.

When they get started. But the advanced users, they know which configuration to tune Argo CD. So we put those in, in terms of optional things that people can use, but not everyone is aware.

So this time around we are giving that signal. It's like it will be a smooth transition upgrade, but just watch out that some of the defaults will be changed to improve the performance and scalability that some other users already using in production. So this is making available for everyone to benefit when they just getting started with Argo CD Closet.

I think that also, um, another thing that is, uh, kind of big news with this release is that since day one in Argo CD, we were unopinionated about how people should manage secrets with GitHubs. And this is, uh, uh, one of the first questions that arises when people are starting to adopt gi adopt GitHubs, and even when they already adopted and moving towards more advanced configurations. What do you do with the secrets?

You cannot store them in Git. So we were unopinionated about this, but now as, uh, we have seen how the industry standards are, uh, going, and, uh, again, this level of maturity that we have reached, we actually have an opinion and we are now recommending users to manage their GitHub secrets using Kubernetes operators instead of using other solutions that, uh, can be, uh, less secure and, uh, less scalable. Excellent.

Excuse me. Carlos, let's focus in on the sig you're leading. What's happening there?

What focus in on the sig Yes. That you're leading. What's happening there?

So the sig, uh, got formed because there was, um, Argos C is a very big project. We have like 17,000 users in Slack in one channel. We have multiple channels and we have a lot of issues open by the end community.

So six performance and scalability was one of the areas that people wanted a, um, a forum to get together to discuss verbally. So we have these weekly meetings, biweekly meetings that we get together and we discuss like, what are the top issues in terms of performance, and also contributors coming in and asking questions of like, is this change? Make sense?

Doesn't, doesn't make change. Uh, they have approved requests that they want to be reviewed, or maybe they have ideas on how to do a benchmark. Like how do we measure if the performance is working or not working?

So we have work on creating a benchmark. We have a GitHub repo, and we share that. People can have a benchmark of that.

And the enhancements that are coming in, they're very critical. 'cause a performance scalability change affects everyone. So we want to make it sure, want to make sure that a lot of eyes are on it.

So it's a way of like organizing the folks around the project on a topic that they're passionate about it to have this working in production. A lot of people use Argo CD in production systems, so they want to make sure that the, the software works at scale. Excellent.

Guys, we're almost outta time. 15 minutes here goes quickly. But for people who wanna get more information, where, where should they go?

Where do you start? Go to GitHub, go to a website. Both.

0 Reg Reggie, uh, created a great, uh, blog post. So we have a, uh, blog post that we publish information about it. 0 you want to expand more where that blog post is located?

Yeah, sure. So, uh, we have the, uh, we actually have even two blog posts about, uh, this release. And both of them are shared on the Argo approach of Medium.

One of them was written by me and the other was written by Dan Garfield, my manager. And also we have a very, very clear, uh, upgrade guide in the official Argo CD documentation that read the docs where all the steps are listed. So, But what's the website?

What's the URL Argo C read the docs Argo CD. Read the docs. Read the doc.

Read the docs. Read doc. com.

You can find all the information there. com or just Argo CD? Read the docs.

Well, I don't think that I remember it by heart, but I think it's Argo the Redox io. But it's very, no. What, what's the Argo website?

No, so the main Argo website is the GitHub, uh, is the GitHub repository, but the documentation is on the Redox i Argo Pro, uh, do io and, and it's easy to find is you search Google it. Yeah. One thing that I wanted to add is this, on this event for Q, we have a day zero event.

Argo Con. Yes. We have a full track.

We have two rooms packed of a lot of talks, a full day. The biggest choice and the video are already online on the C. Go Check that out too.

It's C on the C CCF playlist, Argo Con, uh, EU 2025. And Rigi gave a talk and a lot of contributors gave, uh, great talk that will get you started on using Argo. That's the kinda stuff people need.

You heard it here. We're here at Cucu. We'll be back with more in a moment.

Stay tuned.