CI/CD

Argo CD GitOps Promotions with Kargo (by Akuity): A Brilliant Idea with Flawed Execution?

Most of the time, I split projects into “it provides value” and “it’s not good enough”. However, every once in a while a project comes along that produces both types of impressions.

There are projects that show a lot of potential. Projects that might represent some important steps toward a better way to manage or operate systems. Yet, those same projects might be showing the vision rather than being something we should adopt today.

Such a vision could be huge like, for example, Kubernetes which was horrible when it was first released and, at that time, I did not recommend it to anyone. Yet, its vision proved to be a valid one for all of us to pursue. The end result is what we have today. Almost everyone is using or, at least, planning to use Kubernetes in some capacity or another. It started as a vision that took a while to materialize.

There are examples of projects that have much smaller scope, yet also started as “this is not good enough today but we can see where that might take us”. One of such projects is, in my opinion, Kargo by Akuity. I think that it has a lot of potential. It might be an important step forward in decoupling our workflows. It might be just what we need to orchestrate promotions of releases managed by GitOps or, to be more precise, Argo CD. The idea behind it is great, yet, I am not sure that there are enough compeling reasons to use it today. It’s great. It truly is. Yet… Something might be missing.

CI vs. CD vs. GitOps vs. State Management: What is the Real Difference?

Today I want to answer a set of questions I get fairly often. People ask me to compare GitOps with CI/CD or to explain the difference between CI and CD. At other times, I hear people talk about those terms with confidence, yet often with missunderstanding of what those are. To make things more complicated, tools tend to have missguided names that often make the situation even more complicated. So, today’s session will explain the differences between Continuous Integration or CI, Continuous Delivery or CD, and GitOps. We’ll add state management to the mix and we’ll go not only through processes and activities related to those terms, but also try to demistify the tools in those areas. As a bonus, we’ll add visualization challenges. Who knows? We might come to the conclusion that we are doing it all wrong or that our expectations are unrealistic.

GitOps Broke CI/CD! Here is How to Fix It With Argo Events

GitOps is amazing, especially for those using Kubernetes. Yet, GitOps poses significant problems when it comes to execution of tasks that should be performed after deployments. For example, we cannot run functional tests through workflows or pipelines like GitHub Actions or Jenkins. GitOps broke CI/CD processes, and we need to fix that.

Let me explain.

If Dockerfile and Makefile Had a Baby... Earthly and Earthfile

Makefile walks into a bar and notices Dockerfile sitting alone. She joins him, they talk, they flirt…

The rest of that story has been censored. You’ll have to fill in the gaps using your imagination.

…a baby was born, and that baby was named Earthfile.

From Makefile to Justfile (or Taskfile): Recipe Runner Replacement

When I work locally, if I need to create a cluster I just execute cluster-create, wait for a few moments, and a local cluster with everything I need is running.

Say Goodbye to Makefile - Use Taskfile to Manage Tasks in CI/CD Pipelines and Locally

When I work with pipelines, what you might call CI, or CI/CD, I have “special” requirements that might not be the same as what others might have, or, more likely, what others think of.