After 33k commits, nearly 200k contributions, 9.6k contributors, and almost 15k pull requests, the Argo Project has officially graduated within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The Argo Project was first created and open-sourced in 2017 by Applatix who was later acquired by Intuit. Shortly thereafter, BlackRock, Codefresh, and RedHat joined the project as it moved into the CNCF.

Recently I started hearing more and more about developer experience, which to me was a bit new-ish, so seriously what is developer experience? Another buzz word? A real thing? It’s been a while since I actually developed code … yes yes … you can laugh … a sales person that used to be a developer 😃, and A LOT changed since then. The number of tools a developer should work with on a daily basis is just crazy.

Earlier this year, when Codefresh announced the first course in our GitOps for Argo certification program – GitOps Fundamentals – we had high hopes that the course would satisfy the community’s pent-up demand for practical GitOps knowledge. To meet this demand, we designed a course that features lab environments to dramatically improve the learning experience. Each student gets a lab environment pre-configured with everything they need to learn GitOps using Argo CD.

We have already covered several aspects of Argo CD in this blog such as best practices, cluster topologies and even application ordering, but it is always good to get back to basics and talk about installation and more importantly about maintenance. Chances are that one of your first Argo CD installations happened with kubectl as explained in the getting started guide.

At the start of this year, Codefresh announced the first ever GitOps certification for Argo CD. The certification consists of 3 different levels covering GitOps end-to-end from beginning to end. With the launch of Level 1 (Fundamentals), we have seen an unprecedented interest from people that want to learn about GitOps resulting in over 10,000 students and 3,000 certified engineers!

If you are using Argo CD, you may be already familiar with how the Application CRD (Custom Resource Definition) object helps you logically group together your Kubernetes Manifests. The Application object is the atomic unit of work in Argo CD, and you should think of all your Kubernetes objects that are in an Application as a single entity. Applications are also autonomous. Meaning that, by design, one Application doesn’t know about the status or health of another Application.

Many organizations that have already implemented a DevOps culture are looking to further accelerate their development process by adopting GitOps practices in their environments. There is a lot to take into consideration when planning out your GitOps strategy, and you can read more about it at this Codefresh learning center about adopting GitOps.

Last month we announced the 3 major features we are adding to the Codefresh platform. Dashboards for DORA metrics, support for any external Continuous Integration system and a hosted GitOps service. The hosted GitOps experience (powered by Argo CD) is now available to all new Codefresh accounts (even free ones) so that simply by signing up you can start deploying applications right away to your Kubernetes cluster without having to maintain your own Argo CD installation.

Kubernetes offers a way to store configuration files and manage them via a ConfigMap. Functionally, they seem very similar to Kubernetes Secrets, where both constructs are used to store information that can be used in a Pod. This information could be usernames and passwords of a connection string to a database.

Today we’re excited to make three major announcements. First, we’re making it easier to adopt the very popular Codefresh GitOps CD with a fully SaaS offering that is hosted and managed by Codefresh. We’ve heard from many in the community that they’d like to get away from managing Argo CD and focus just on deploying and managing their applications. Hosted GitOps CD makes it easier than ever to adopt GitOps, just create an account, connect your target clusters, and deploy.