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⚠️⚠️⚠️ STG SRG Portal ⚠️⚠️⚠️/Technical article/[KubeCon Day 3] ArgoCon 2024 Participation Report

[KubeCon Day 3] ArgoCon 2024 Participation Report

Ishikawa Kumo, Service Reliability Group (SRG), Media Management Division@ishikawa_kumo)is.
#SRGThe Service Reliability Group primarily provides comprehensive support for the infrastructure surrounding our media services, focusing on improving existing services, launching new ones, and contributing to open-source software (OSS).
This article provides session introductions and summaries for ArgoCon 2024, a co-located event of KubeCon NA 2024.
 

About Argocon

ArgoCon is one of KubeCon's co-located events, held with the aim of fostering collaboration, discussion, and knowledge sharing related to the Argo project. The Argo project includes four components: Argo CD, Argo Workflows, Argo Rollouts, and Argo Events, and this event is vendor-neutral. It is organized by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's Argo community, which includes companies such as Codefresh, Red Hat, and Intuit.
ArgoCon started as a virtual event in 2021 and was well-received from the beginning. It continued under the auspices of the CNCF, and in 2022, an in-person event was held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Since 2023, it has been held twice a year as a co-located event of KubeCon in North America and Europe, with multiple tracks, demonstrating the high popularity of the Argo project.
In fact, among the co-located events held at KubeCon 2024 NA, ArgoCon had the most sessions, running from the early morning keynote to the evening lightning talks. The exhibition booths were also very popular, with so many people that they blocked the aisles.

Atmosphere at ArgoCon venue

Due to various issues, including flight cancellations, I arrived in Salt Lake City the night before ArgoCon.
Due to jet lag, I didn't sleep much, so I arrived at the venue around 8:30 a.m. to get my badge issued early. The temperature was around 5 degrees Celsius, and although the forecast was for a light drizzle, it actually turned into heavy snow.
This venue is also beautiful.
The sponsors of this year's ArgoCon are as follows:
The venue was divided into two sections, and the Keynote room in particular was very large. The Keynote room was almost completely full.
The ArgoCon booth was crowded from the morning, and the main attraction was this plush toy.

Recommended Session Summary

This time, I participated fully from the morning keynote until the evening. The main sessions were running simultaneously in two rooms, so I chose sessions focusing on ArgoCD and ArgoRollouts.
Also, regarding the daytime lightning talks, I missed some sessions because I was watching demos at the booths.
The following are my recommended sessions. You can watch them on YouTube after KubeCon NA 2024 concludes.

ArgoCon | Welcome + Project Update - Pratik Wadher, Intuit

The future direction of the Argo project can be broadly summarized into the following three points:
  1. Capacity expansion for large enterprises
  1. Enhanced integration with Kubernetes and the ecosystem
  1. Further improvement of the user experience
Furthermore, the Argo project and the use of AI are points to watch out for in the future. Incidentally, "We don't use AI☺️" was at the top of the list on the case submission site (lol).

Building a Cutting-Edge Kubernetes Internal Developer Platform at NVIDIA - Carlos Santana, AWS & Feng Zhou, Nvidia Corp

This is a discussion about using Backstage and Argo projects within the IDP (Internal Developer Platform).
Although the speaker's English was very difficult to understand, they gave a presentation on the configuration and operation of NVIDIA's IDP. In particular, the common IaC template using gitops-bridge and the mechanism for automatically generating CLIs were very interesting.
The related repositories are here.

Enhancing Compliance and Safety with Argo CD Ephemeral Access - Leonardo Luz Almeida & Vijay Agrawal, Intuit

This is about Ephemeral Access in ArgoCD.
The following difficulties were pointed out in the operation of ArgoCD:
  1. There is a lack of detailed access control.
  1. Enterprise environments have security risks.
  1. UI operations are untrackable.
  1. It's difficult to adjust things like deployment freezes.
Intuit's solution to this is the Argo UI Extension for Ephemeral Access.
You can find more details in this repository:
Furthermore, it appears that approval-based ChangeRequest functionality can also be implemented by utilizing the AccessRequestController within this Extension.

Space Age GitOps: Lifting off with Argo Promotions (Live Demo!) - Michael Crenshaw & Zach Aller, Intuit

This was a presentation about cross-environment promotion using ArgoCD. CyberAgent doesn't have cases this complex, so I only understood about half of the content, but I found it very interesting that it's possible to create, approve, and promote pull requests across environments directly within the ArgoCD UI.
The related repositories are here.

GitOps Safety: Rendering Accurate ArgoCD Diffs Directly on Pull Requests - Dag Bjerre Andersen, Doubble & Regina Voloshin, Codefresh by Octopus Deploy

Another way to preview diffs in ArgoCD is through the lightweight CLI tool "argocd-diff-preview".

Managing Application Dependencies in Argo CD - Christian Hernandez, Akuity

These are three solutions proposed by Akuity for resolving dependencies between ArgoCD applications.
  1. Eventual consistency
      2. SkipDryRunOnMissingResource=true
  1. App of App Pattern
      2. SyncWave
  1. ApplicationSets Progressive Syncs
      2. AutoSync

Ephemeral Environment Practices - the Good, Bad, and Ugly - Luke Philips & David Grizzanti, The New York Times

I felt a sense of familiarity with the New York Times' operational practices regarding IDP and ArgoCD, as there were many similarities to the operation of Ameba Blog, which I am in charge of.
The New York Times places great importance on the Ephemeral Environment and, as part of its IDP (Information Development Program), is building automated IaC (Infrastructure as Code) generation and related workflows.
Furthermore, regarding scalability, the New York Times also stated that it is necessary to focus on sharding. For information on optimizing the scalability of ArgoCD, please refer to my previous articles.

Stop Deploying Blind! Using Observability and Argo Rollouts to Light the Way - Kostis Kapelonis, Codefresh by Octopus Deploy

This session showcased best practices for Argo Rollouts. I highly recommend watching it if you're considering Argo Rollouts.
Codefresh pointed out that traffic switching should also be automated in Argo Rollouts, and explained that this requires selecting metrics based on USE and RED criteria.
  • USE
    • UUtilization (percentage of time the service was running)
    • SSaturation (cue length)
    • E: Count (number of errors)
  • RED
    • R: Rate (number of requests per second)
    • EErrors (number of failed requests)
    • DDuration (time taken to process the request)