Understanding Argo CD — A DevOps Perspective

1. Introduction: My Initial Thoughts on Argo CD

Before diving into Argo CD, let me set the context. As someone with extensive experience in Helm, Terraform, and CI/CD using Jenkins and GitHub Actions, I initially struggled to grasp the value proposition of Argo CD. Why adopt Argo CD when my existing pipeline already handles deployments effectively?

2. Traditional CI/CD Workflow: How I Currently Deploy Applications

• Repository Structure: A single repository contains both the application source code and the CI/CD pipeline configuration.

https://github.com/devops4solutions/eks-hello-svc

• CI Process: GitHub Actions builds the application and pushes the Docker image to ECR.
• CD Process: Terraform handles Helm releases to the EKS cluster.

Deployment Flow:

• Dev → Test → Environment Approval Process -> Production
• Automatic deployment to production upon merge to the master branch.
• Rollback by reverting commits in the source repository.

Advantages:

• Centralized workflow — All configuration in one repository.
• CI and CD are tightly coupled, so there is no need for a separate notification process.
• No need for additional repositories or components.