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Nearly two years ago, Intuit acquired Applatix to accelerate Intuit’s cloud journey by leveraging cloud native technologies to greatly increase development velocity. Applatix’s focus was to provide the essential building blocks based on containers and public cloud to enable enterprises to quickly and continuously develop and deploy software and services. It wasn’t easy. We were shepherding a new way of software development, changing the way developers create software and ship code. We knew there was a better way and so we set out to create Argo, a container-native workflow engine for Kubernetes, and open sourced it to the cloud native developer community.
After the acquisition of Applatix by Intuit, we continued our mission, joined forces with fellow CNCF member BlackRock, and contributed to the cloud native community projects that started with solving the needs we internally had running large scale Kubernetes infrastructure. We wanted to share our learnings in advancing the mission of transforming software delivery in the cloud native landscape for the benefit of the broader community through projects like:
- Argo CD, declarative continuous deployment for Kubernetes, to support our massive multi-tenant Kubernetes based platform, we needed a GitOps based Continuous Delivery solution that can deploy applications in multiple clusters and support enterprise features such as single sign-on (SSO) and RBAC.
- Argo Events, an event-based dependency manager for Kubernetes to trigger workflows and applications.
- Argo Rollouts, As Intuit started managing 2000+ services across 160+ clusters as documented in this case study, we needed a solution to do blue-green and canary deployments and an experimentation platform that provided Progressive Delivery.
In the meantime, Argo Workflows, got widely adopted by the machine learning and data processing communities as they were looking for a highly scalable, Kubernetes-native workflow orchestrator. Argo Workflows has been part of Kubeflow from v0.1.
Two years later, it’s humbling to see Argo projects, collectively, have 6,000+ stars on Github, and gaining significant traction in the cloud native community with more than 60 enterprises publicly backing the project (Adobe, Alibaba Cloud, Google, Nvidia, SAP, Tesla, Ticketmaster, Volvo, and many more), and contributing to the projects. As a result of this widespread adoption and community participation, we have recently submitted Argo to be a part of the CNCF Incubation project.
Today, I’m excited to share the we’ve teamed up with Weave Works and AWS to unify CNCF Flux, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation sandbox project, and Argo CD to announce Argo Flux, an open source GitOps continuous delivery tool that will bring the best of the two projects under one umbrella. This partnership unifies the two projects and, more importantly, the developer and user communities to offer a more comprehensive approach to continuous delivery using Kubernetes. As a result of joining forces to form a larger developer community, we hope to bring more innovation faster for the benefit of everyone in the cloud native community.
As a first step in the unification of the projects, the Argo CD and CNCF Flux development communities are designing and implementing GitOps engine, which forms the substrate for the two projects while, in the short-term, preserving the existing user experience of the projects. The two communities will continue to work together to evolve the code base to provide a unified user experience.
Please join Bob Wise, General Manager, EKS, Alexis Richardson, Founder & CEO, Weave Works, and me at the AWS Container Day for a keynote followed by a panel discussion Kubernetes and GitOps. You can see demos of the projects and interact with the maintainers working on the projects. I hope to see you there!
Please also join us at the Intuit booth (S47) at the main KubeCon conference to learn more about Argo and interact with the maintainers of the projects.