Zach Aller
Intuit, Lead Argo Rollouts Maintainer
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Zach Aller is a software engineer at Intuit and a lead maintainer of Argo Rollouts. He has 15+ years of software development experience with a strong focus on SRE/Platform tooling. He has a strong background in Kubernetes and has managed large scale Kubernetes clusters for multiple organizations. He is is a strong proponent in GitOps style deployments which he has implemented at scale.
Space Age GitOps: One Small Step for Environment Promotion at Intuit
Intuit, the creators of Argo CD and pioneers in GitOps, have been tackling the persistent challenge of environment promotion in our more than 17,000 services. Traditional CI-based promotion tools like Jenkins result in a subpar user experience. To address this, we’ve begun transitioning to GitOps Promoter, deploying it across several Intuit assets with promising results. The new promotion system is transparent, easy to use, and simple to debug.
While the experience has been largely positive, we’re actively working through challenges such as monorepo complexities, the Promoter’s "interrupt model" of handling frequent deployments, and the need for enhancements in Argo CD’s new Source Hydrator feature. We’ve contributed improvements to the Hydrator’s commit messages by adding templating support, and we’ve solved the longstanding problem of tracing manifest commits to code commits. This talk will share our journey, lessons learned, and the future of GitOps-driven environment promotion.
No More Pipelines: Reconciling Environment Promotion via Commit Statuses with Argo CD
We’ve learned to think of environment promotion in terms of deployment pipelines. But in the age of Kubernetes and everything-declarative, we need to abandon the imperative pipeline mode of thinking. According to the Kubernetes model, environment state should be declared, and an operator ought to drive towards that state. To achieve this, we need GitOps Promoter and its CommitStatus API.
GitOps Promoter is a new environment promotion tool that adheres strictly to GitOps principles. Promotions are handled through automated PRs, and promotion gates are implemented as commit statuses. This talk will demonstrate how to use the GitOps Promoter’s CommitStatus API to gate promotions on Argo CD application health. We’ll show how the only prerequisite to enabling a fully declarative GitOps promotion experience is “having an opinion about a commit.”
Space-Age GitOps: the Rise of the Humble Pull Request
As they scale GitOps, organizations quickly hit some pain points: users don’t see the exact changes before they’re deployed, environment promotion is tricky, and there’s no easy, git-first way to do automated rollbacks. This talk will assert three new rules for GitOps to help solve these problems: developers should see hydrated diffs as part of their review process, manifest hydration should be reproducible, and environment promotions as well as rollbacks should be handled as automated pull requests. Pull requests give developers a place to review and discuss changes, they provide a place to implement promotion gates, and they exist in an ecosystem which developers already know and love. This talk will present proposals for new Argo CD features which will make these next-generation GitOps practices easy and intuitive to implement in any organization.
Space Age GitOps: Lifting Off with Argo Promotions (Live Demo!)
GitOps is an industry standard best practice in the Kubernetes space. But there are still gaps in the developer experience. Change previews and environment promotion have been two of the main pain points. Upcoming Argo CD features fill this gap by providing automated change previews as PR comments and by managing environment promotion by automatically opening and merging pull requests.
This talk presents a live demo of these new Argo CD features. We’ll show you how change previews will help your developers merge changes faster and with more confidence; we’ll show how you can design a change promotion strategy tailored to your organization’s needs; and we’ll show how your developers can monitor change promotions via the Argo CD UI.
Promotion-by-PR is one of several options for managing GitOps promotions. Besides showing a demo, we’ll compare and contrast this strategy with other open source and vendor-based solutions so that the audience can select the system that matches their needs.
Real Time Argo Rollouts Analytics Powered by Notification Engine
Managing thousands of applications across hundreds of clusters configured across thousands of git repos, all in the hands of developers who have the ability to customize their own configuration presents a significant challenge when gaining insights from their usage. As an impact and outcome driven team, we need to understand our current state: 1. Are developers following best practices? 2. Are they making changes to the provided defaults? What are the most common changes? 3. Are there problematic configurations currently in production?
In this talk, we will discuss how we utilized the notification engine to power rollout insights at scale! This engine provides us with real-time information on the status of all our rollout resources, allowing us to quickly identify any issues, ask dynamic questions, and take corrective actions if needed. Join us to learn how our insights into live Argo Rollouts at scale have allowed us to better manage our applications and ensure quality across Intuit.
Extending Argo Projects: Customizing Argo CD and Argo Rollouts for Your Needs
In the realm of technology, Argo Projects shine as robust solutions. Yet, accommodating company-specific feature requests while preserving flexibility is a challenge. The presenters are Argo maintainers who are constantly striving to strike this balance. Their focus is to maintain Argo's flexibility while extending functionalities in Argo CD and Argo Rollouts. This presentation delves into ways these tools can be customized to fit diverse company’s needs. You will learn about different extension mechanisms and gain architectural insights for informed decisions. Attendees will leave equipped to shape deployment workflows effectively in a rapidly evolving tech landscape.
CNCF-hosted Co-located Events Europe 2025 Sessionize Event
CNCF-hosted Co-located Events North America 2024 Sessionize Event
CNCF-hosted Co-located Events Europe 2024 Sessionize Event
CNCF-hosted Co-located Events North America 2023 Sessionize Event
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