Nearly two years ago, Intuit acquired Applatix to accelerate Intuit’s cloud journey by using cloud-native technologies to greatly increase development speed. Applatix’s mission was to provide essential building blocks based on containers and public cloud technologies to enable enterprises to quickly and continuously develop and deploy software and services. Applatix created Argo, a container-native workflow engine for Kubernetes, and open sourced it to the cloud-native developer community. The Argo Project continued to flourish at Intuit, adding three related projects: Argo CD for continuous delivery, Argo Rollouts for progressive delivery, and Argo Events, an event-based dependency manager. Fellow CNCF community member BlackRock contributed Argo Events to the Argo Project. As the project grew, so did its adoption and community of users and contributors with many marquee companies using them in production with a vibrant Slack community and hundreds of contributors.
Today, we’re excited to announce that the Argo Project is now part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as an incubation-level hosted project. As a hosted project, Argo joins other projects, such as OpenTracing, Fluentd, and NATS, in advancing the adoption of cloud-native computing as part of the CNCF and the larger Linux Foundation, which provides governance, marketing, support, and community outreach.
The Argo Project is a set of essential Kubernetes-native tools for deploying and running jobs and applications on Kubernetes. All the Argo tools are implemented as controllers and custom resources. These tools can be used independently, but they are even more powerful when used together.
- Argo Workflows enables the creation of complex parallel workflows as Kubernetes resources and is used in many different use cases from CI/CD pipelines for DAG-based machine learning workflows. It is the workflow engine behind the open source Kubeflow Pipelines.
- Argo Events provides declarative management of event-based dependencies and triggers for Kubernetes resources based on various event sources. A common use of Argo Events is to trigger Argo Workflows.
- Argo CD provides a declarative GitOps-based deployment of any Kubernetes resource, including Argo Events, services, and deployments across multiple Kubernetes clusters.
- Argo Rollouts provides declarative progressive delivery strategies such as canary, blue-green and more general forms of experimentation. Argo Rollouts may be used with Argo CD to implement sophisticated delivery strategies.
The Argo Project is well aligned with the CNCF’s mission to make cloud-native computing ubiquitous. Argo projects are widely adopted at Intuit and are part of our Intuit development platform, supporting our development community and our mission to power prosperity around the world by serving the financial needs of tens of millions of businesses and individuals. Now, as a part of the CNCF, we can better share our mutual learnings to advance CNCF’s mission for the benefit of all end-users in the cloud-native community.
Argo is actively being used in production by more than 110 organizations, including Adobe, Alibaba Cloud, Data Dog, Datastax, Google, GitHub, IBM, NVIDIA, SAP, Tesla, Ticketmaster, and Volvo. Below is a partial listing of the organizations that self-reported Argo usage in production.
Notable Argo statistics:
- Argo projects currently have over 8300 stars on GitHub.
- Argo projects have over 425 contributors across projects and over repo 1500 forks.
- Argo projects have over 4000 commits across projects and 183% YoY growth.
- Argo Slack organization has over 2800 members.
We are delighted and very excited to continue our cloud journey by using cloud-native technologies and pushing toward widespread adoption and community participation in these projects.
