CNCF: Argo Has Graduated

December 8, 2022

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation noted the graduation of Argo, which will join other graduated projects such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy.

The Argo Project enables organizations to declaratively deploy and run cloud native applications and workflows on Kubernetes using GitOps. Created and open sourced in 2017 by Applatix, which was acquired by Intuit, the Argo project was accepted into the CNCF Incubator in April 2020. Intuit, along with BlackRock – which contributed Argo Events to the project – have been heavily involved in the development and cultivation of the project and the community.

Argo consists of four Kubernetes-native sub-projects, including Argo Workflows, Argo Events, Argo CD, and Argo Rollouts. Argo Workflows enables the creation of complex parallel workflows as Kubernetes resources and is used in many different use cases from CI/CD pipelines to machine learning workflows. Argo Events provides declarative management of event-based dependencies and triggers for Kubernetes resources, including Argo Workflows, based on various event sources. The other two sub-projects, Argo CD and Argo Rollouts, help engineers understand, adopt, and use Kubernetes as well as make GitOps best practices significantly more approachable for teams who want to adopt it. These tools can be used independently, but there is great benefit in using them together to create and operate complex applications at scale.

"Graduating from the CNCF Incubator requires a project to reach difficult-to-attain milestones, significant adoption, diversity, and sustained growth," said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the CNCF. "Argo has shown itself to be an important piece of the cloud native technology stack and GitOps movement, we are thrilled to see it graduate."

Argo is actively used in production by over 350 organizations – a 250% increase since joining the CNCF Incubator – including Adobe, Blackrock, Capital One, Google, Intuit, PagerDuty, Peloton, Snyk, Swisscom, Tesla, and Volvo and in the latest CNCF user survey, over 50% of respondents said they were running Argo in production, or evaluating it. With 2300 companies and 8000 individuals contributing to the project, it's one of the strongest and most diverse communities in CNCF.

"We started the Argo project after realizing the limitless potential of adding new capabilities to Kubernetes through its powerful extension mechanism. Argo Workflows and Events has enabled data scientists to leverage Kubernetes clusters in unforeseen and exciting new ways. Meanwhile, DevOps engineers have fallen in love with how Argo CD and Rollouts brought both simplicity and power to the application delivery experience," said Jesse Suen, Argo Project co-creator, co-founder, and CTO at Akuity. "We are honored that Argo is now categorized among other incredible CNCF projects such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy, and incredibly proud of what our amazing community has accomplished."

"Argo has passed every test the CNCF has thrown at it. Graduation means Argo meets the highest standards for security, user adoption, and governance. By every measure, Argo is a mature, sustainable, and successful open source project," said Dan Garfield, Argo project maintainer, chief open source officer, and co-founder of Codefresh. "More than graduation, our incredible community shows just how powerful and mature the Argo project is."

"Cloud native and open source technologies are a core pillar of Intuit's infrastructure, enabling us to increase overall development velocity at scale," said Pratik Wadher, senior vice president of product development at Intuit. "Argo has also been a critical part of this journey, from our humble beginnings where we created the Argo Project at Applatix to how we leverage and maintain today's multi-faceted tooling at Intuit. We believe in the power of open collaboration and are committed to our role as users and maintainers. It's humbling and inspiring to be a part of this passionate and engaged community."

"As an early contributor to Argo, we saw the potential the technology had for enabling organizations to more easily take a GitOps approach to both OpenShift application and cluster deployments," said Joe Fernandes, vice president and general manager of hybrid cloud platforms at Red Hat. "We've seen the project evolve to further bring together developers and operations and address use cases faced by enterprise customers in multi-cluster Kubernetes environments. Argo is an integral part of the Red Hat OpenShift ecosystem and the foundation for OpenShift GitOps and we look forward to continuing to support and contribute to the project beyond graduation."

End User Support

"At Adobe, we're using all four Argo projects to drive various workflows, including CI/CD, just-in-time provisioning, cluster updates, and much more," said Aya Ivtsan, principal scientist at Adobe. "Argo's modularity and versatility, along with its vibrant community, have helped us provide flexible and extensible solutions to Adobe's developers. We are excited to see Argo reaching graduation status in CNCF and looking forward to our continued collaboration with the Argo community!"

"When BlackRock decided to write an event-based system for Kubernetes to fill a gap we saw in the industry, we knew we wanted to donate it to an existing high-quality open source organization, where cloud native systems were being built and there was a like-minded community. The Argo Project was quickly identified as the organization and the community we wanted to work with," said Mike Bowen senior principal engineer and OSPO director at BlackRock. "Working with the Argo community to build Argo Events has been a catalyst to many follow-on opportunities for BlackRock within the Argo Project, the Linux Foundation and CNCF at large and has yielded many positive product and business outcomes across our cloud native estate. For example, we went from running imperative shell scripts deploying hundreds of applications across tens of clusters to using Argo CD. Argo CD provides the scalability and robustness to deploy thousands of applications across hundreds of clusters using many Kubernetes distributions."

"Argo tools are used extensively by multiple teams at CERN," said Ricardo Rocha, computing engineer at CERN. "Argo CD has made multi-cluster and application management easy with GitOps, speeding up the deployment process and improving overall service availability. With Argo Workflows, physicists have gained a new way to manage their full analysis code declaratively. We're excited about Argo's graduation and look forward to what's coming next."

To graduate, Argo met the rigorous standards required of a mature and stable project, including a clear governance and committer process, healthy growth and adoption, and high standards for security and compliance. Argo achieved and maintains an OpenSSF Best Practices Badge and went through a third-party security audit in July 2022.