Argo CD in Practice
The GitOps way of managing cloud-native applications
Liviu Costea
Spiros Economakis
BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI
Argo CD in Practice
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First published: November 2022
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ISBN 978-1-80323-332-1
Foreword
In their book, Liviu and Spiros provide an excellent introduction to Argo CD that helps you start using it in a matter of minutes. The book provides great introduction base concepts and the basic vocabulary of both GitOps and Argo CD. Besides teaching about Argo CD itself, the book covers a lot of ecosystem tools that are extremely useful and will prepare you for real-life use cases. Even the basic examples come with YAML snippets, which again will be helpful to solve real-life challenges.
Content gets more advanced and more interesting pretty quickly. You will learn lots of interesting details about advanced Argo CD features as well as about architecture and some internals. This in-depth material will be handy for DevOps engineers who are responsible for running Argo CD for a whole organization and need to deal with scalability and performance challenges. The book provides a description of the best practices and patterns for running and managing Argo CD. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to get into GitOps or who is already familiar with or looking to learn about advanced topics.
Alexander Matyushentsev
Co-founder and Chief Architect at Akuity
Contributors
About the authors
Liviu Costea started as a developer in the early 2000s and his career path led him to different roles, from developer to coding architect, and from team lead to the Chief Technical Officer. In 2012, he transitioned to DevOps when, at a small company, someone had to start working on pipelines and automation because the traditional way wasn’t scalable anymore.
In 2018, he started with the platform team and then became the tech lead in the release team at Mambu, where they designed most of the Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, adopting GitOps practices. They have been live with Argo CD since 2019. More recently, he joined Juni, a promising start-up, where they are planning GitOps adoption. For his contributions to OSS projects, including Argo CD, he was named a CNCF ambassador in August 2020.
Spiros Economakis started as a software engineer in 2010 and went through a series of jobs and roles, from software engineer and software architect to head of cloud. In 2013, he founded his own start-up, and that was his first encounter with DevOps culture. With a small team, he built a couple of CI/CD pipelines for a microservice architecture and mobile app releases. After this, with most of the companies he has been involved with, he has influenced DevOps culture and automation.
In 2019, he started as an SRE in Lenses (acquired by Celonis) and soon introduced the organization to Kubernetes, GitOps, and the cloud. He transitioned to a position as head of cloud, where he introduced GitOps across the whole company and used Argo CD to bootstrap K8s clusters and continuous delivery practices. Now, he works in an open source company called Mattermost as a senior engineering manager, where he transformed the old GitOps approach (fluxcd) to GitOps 2.0 with Argo CD and built a scalable architecture for multi-tenancy as the single GitOps platform in the company.
About the reviewer
Roel Reijerse studied electrical engineering and computer science at Delft University of Technology, with a specialization in computer graphics as part of his MSc. After several years of working as an embedded software engineer, he moved to backend engineering. Currently, he is employed by Celonis, where he works on a real-time streaming data platform managed by Argo CD.
Sai Kothapalle works as the Lead Site Reliability engineer at Enix. His experience includes working on distributed systems, running Kubernetes and ArgoCD Tools at scale for cloud providers, fintech companies and clients.