Is it worth implementing a GitOps workflow with ArgoCD for Kubernetes deployments?

All answers to this question.

GitOps is a massive upgrade for visibility. With ArgoCD, your Git repository becomes the "Single Source of Truth." If someone manually changes a replica count in the cluster using the CLI, ArgoCD detects that "drift" and automatically syncs it back to what is defined in Git. This is a dream for compliance and auditing because every change to the infrastructure is a documented commit with an author and a timestamp. No more "who changed this?" mysteries. The learning curve is there, but once you move to a declarative model, you’ll never want to go back to imperative Jenkins scripts.

   Answered 2024-08-18 by Margaret Adams

How are you planning to manage secrets? GitOps requires everything to be in Git, so you'll need a solution for sensitive data like API keys.

   Answered 2024-08-20 by Paul Wright

• We are looking at Sealed Secrets or HashiCorp Vault integration. Do you find that managing these adds significant complexity to the ArgoCD setup, or is there a standard "best practice" for handling secrets in a GitOps repo?

     Commented 2024-08-22 by Charles Scott

The visual dashboard in ArgoCD alone is worth it. Being able to see the health of every pod and resource in a tree view makes troubleshooting so much faster.

   Answered 2024-08-24 by Nancy Green

• Exactly, Nancy. The observability provided by the Argo UI helps even the non-DevOps members of the team understand what is running in production.

     Commented 2024-08-25 by Mary King