Argo-cd perimeter/integration

[bhack]

What is the scope of argo-cd over Jenkins X plans and Spinnaker interaction with k8s.
Also, is it planned any integration with the new emerging k8s dev tools that are starting to be discussed in sig-apps?

[jessesuen]

Thanks for the interest! Let me preface my answer by first explaining that I have a surface level experience with Spinnaker (from when we were evaluating its Kubernetes features ourselves), and have only read about Jenkins X.

From my limited understanding, I would say the main differences are:

• Scope is much smaller: ArgoCD is solely concentrated on K8s, whereas Spinnaker handles pretty much all cloud providers and container orchestrators. Jenkins X is k8s based, but is a complete platform and helps bootstrap your entire development process, deployment model, with integrations with your issue tracker
• ArgoCD will stray into the territory of CO (continuous operations) and provide ops functionality such as application monitoring, user-defined actions
• ArgoCD is GitOps based (declarative, level driven), where Spinnaker is event/pipeline driven
• ArgoCD is agnostic to your CI, and provides gRPC/REST/CLI to integrate with your CI of choice. Jenkins X of course requires Jenkins
• ArgoCD is less opinionated. It's current opinion is that that manifests be described in ksonnet (which will likely expand in the future) apps in git. Spinnaker uses naming conventions. Jenkins X appears to mandate separate git repositories for environments

We haven't looked at dev tool integration, but it's definitely something we're open to.

[bhack]

To summarize.. with the integration of dev tools it will be quite complete.

[bhack]

/cc @jlewi What do you think about this for Kubeflow? I think that could be useful inside e full e2e example experience with the integration of dev tool.

[bhack]

Could be interesting to find a place for this in the dev workflow-trail. For feebacks: https://articles.microservices.com/developer-workflow-trail-for-cloud-native-applications-request-for-feedback-a9365b64c790

[jlewi]

I think this could be very useful for Kubeflow.

We could potentially use it to automatically update our Kubeflow test/dev environments (kubeflow/testing#95).

We'd also like to regularly rebuild our Docker images (kubeflow/kubeflow#666) Our release process is just a bunch of Argo workflows. So all we really need is a mechanism to trigger those workflows in response to GitHub events. It looks like argo-cd will provide the infrastructure needed to support that.

[jstrachan]

@jessesuen BTW a couple of points on Jenkins X

• you can reuse the same git repo for each environment and use separate branches if you wish; we recommend using separate repositories though as its easier for RBAC to have different roles/merge policies on separate repos
• currently yes Jenkins X uses Jenkins but longer term we're looking at reusing Prow and/or Argo as the webhook engine + workflow controller respectively as options

[bhack]

@jstrachan I've seen that you have started also to integrated some of the metnioned dev tools right?

[jessesuen]

By now the perimeter of Argo CD is pretty clear. Also we've now documented how Argo CD can be used with Kubeflow

https://www.kubeflow.org/docs/use-cases/gitops-for-kubeflow/

[jgbiii]

Jenkins X does not require Jenkins, although it is an option. However, it can also run entirely independent leveraging Tekton.