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HOME/Technical Articles/[KubeCon Day 3] ArgoCon 2024 Participation Report

[KubeCon Day 3] ArgoCon 2024 Participation Report

Ishikawa Kumo (Service Reliability Group (SRG) of the Media Headquarters)@ishikawa_kumo)is.
#SRG(Service Reliability Group) is a group that mainly provides cross-sectional support for the infrastructure of our media services, improving existing services, launching new ones, and contributing to OSS.
This article introduces and summarizes the sessions at ArgoCon 2024, a co-located event of KubeCon NA 2024.
 

About ArgoCon

ArgoCon is a co-located event of KubeCon, held for the purpose of collaboration, discussion, and knowledge sharing regarding the Argo project. The Argo project includes four projects: Argo CD, Argo Workflows, Argo Rollouts, and Argo Events. This vendor-neutral event is hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's Argo Community, which includes companies such as Codefresh, Red Hat, and Intuit.
ArgoCon launched as a virtual event in 2021 and was well-received from the start. It continued to be hosted by CNCF and an in-person event was held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California in 2022. Since 2023, it has been held twice a year as a co-located event with KubeCon in North America and Europe, with multiple tracks, demonstrating the popularity of the Argo project.
In fact, among the co-located events held at KubeCon 2024 NA, ArgoCon had the most sessions, from early morning keynotes to evening LTs. The exhibitor booths were also very popular, with so many people blocking the aisles.

The atmosphere at ArgoCon

Due to various issues, including flight cancellations, I arrived in Salt Lake City the night before ArgoCon.
Due to jet lag, I didn't get much sleep, so I arrived at the venue around 8:30am to get my badge issued early. The temperature was around 5°C, and although the forecast called for drizzle, it actually turned into heavy snow.
The venue this time is also beautiful.
The sponsors for this year's ArgoCon are as follows:
The venue was divided into two, and the Keynote venue in particular was very spacious. The Keynote venue was almost full.
The ArgoCon booth was crowded from the morning, and the highlight was the stuffed animals.

Recommended Session Summary

This time, I participated in the full event, from the morning keynote to the evening. Since the main sessions were held simultaneously in two rooms, I chose to attend the sessions focusing on ArgoCD and ArgoRollouts.
Also, as I was watching demos at the booth during the daytime LT, I missed some of the sessions.
Below are my recommended sessions, which you can watch on YouTube after KubeCon NA 2024.

ArgoCon | Welcome + Project Update - Pratik Wadher, Intuit

The future direction of the Argo project can be broadly summarized into the following three areas:
  1. Capacity expansion for large enterprises
  1. Strengthened integration with Kubernetes and the ecosystem
  1. Further improving the user experience
Another point to look out for in the future is the Argo Project and the use of AI. Incidentally, on the case submission website, "We don't use AI☺️" was at the top of the list (lol).

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

This is a talk about using Backstage and Argo projects in IDP (Internal Developer Platform).
Although the speaker's English was difficult to understand, he gave an introduction to the configuration and operation of NVIDIA's IDP. In particular, the common IaC template using gitops-bridge and the mechanism for automatically generated CLI were very interesting.
The relevant repository is 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 operating ArgoCD:
  1. Lack of granular permission management
  1. There are security risks in an enterprise environment
  1. UI actions cannot be tracked
  1. Difficult to adjust deployment freezes etc.
Intuit's solution to this is the Argo UI Extension for Ephemeral Access.
More details can be found in this repository:
Furthermore, it appears that approval-based ChangeRequest functionality can also be achieved by using the AccessRequestController in this extension.

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

This talk was about cross-environment promotion using ArgoCD. CyberAgent doesn't have any complicated examples like this, so I only understood about half of the content, but I found it very interesting that PRs can be created, approved, and promoted between environments all within the ArgoCD UI.
The relevant repository is here.

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

As an alternative to ArgoCD Diff Preview, a lightweight CLI tool called "argocd-diff-preview" is provided.

Managing Application Dependencies in Argo CD - Christian Hernandez, Akuity

These are three solutions presented 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

The New York Times' IDP and ArgoCD operational practices have many similarities with the operations of AmebaBlog, which I am in charge of, so I felt a sense of affinity.
The New York Times places great importance on the Ephemeral Environment, and as part of its IDP, it has built automated IaC generation and related workflows.
Regarding scalability, the New York Times also mentioned the need to focus on sharding. Please see my previous article on optimizing ArgoCD's scalability.

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

This session introduced best practices for Argo Rollouts, and I highly recommend it for anyone considering using Argo Rollouts.
Codefresh pointed out that traffic switching should also be automated in Argo Rollouts, and explained that to do so, metrics should be selected based on USE and RED criteria.
  • USE
    • UUtilization (percentage of time the service was running)
    • S: Saturation (Queue Length)
    • E: Count (number of errors)
  • RED
    • R: Rate (requests per second)
    • E: Errors (number of failed requests)
    • DDuration (time it takes to process the request)

⚡ Lightning Talk: Ranking Argo CD Settings in a Tier List - Gerald Nunn, Red Hat

Since it was a lightning talk, the atmosphere was very lively.
The speakers and audience voted to determine the tier ranking of the ArgoCD configurations, but due to time constraints, it was not possible to cover everything.
  • Tier 4 (not very interested)
    • Due to time, it was not possible to sort
  • Tier 5 (unwanted child)
    • Resrouce Tracking method: label

Conclusion

It was quite difficult to stay focused while suffering from jet lag, but thanks to the coffee provided at the venue, I was able to fully participate.
I'm looking forward to the main story starting tomorrow.
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