Argo Workflows 4.0 introduces artifact plugins - a powerful extensibility mechanism that allows you to integrate any storage backend or implement a custom artifact driver without modifying Argo's core. Previously, adding support for a new storage system required contributing code to Argo itself. Now, plugins enable organizations to integrate unsupported or proprietary storage systems. Plugins are language-agnostic, containerized GRPC servers that run alongside workflow pods as sidecars and init containers.

In this talk we'll walk through creating a plugin. This involves implementing a GRPC server as a docker image.

The plugin feature introduces pod management complexities: plugins must be available to the argo-server, and during the init and runtime phases of pods that require them. I'll go over some of these complexities and how they were solved, giving attendees insight into how argo-workflows pods and artifacts are orchestrated.