Wrap up

When Argo CD started back in 2018, nobody could have predicted its success. It had a good foundation (the Application CRD with its source, the Git repository where the manifests are located, and the destination, which is the cluster and namespace where deployments are performed), was well received, understood, and a good fit for the whole GitOps concept.

It also had the right context. Back then, as now, Helm was the most used application deployment tool for Kubernetes, and it was in the V2 version. This meant it came with a component called Tiller installed on the cluster (https://helm.sh/docs/faq/changes_since_helm2/#removal-of-tiller), which was used to apply the manifests, and that component was seen as a big security hole. With Argo CD, you could have still used Helm charts, but you didn’t need Tiller to perform the installation as manifests were generated and applied to the destination cluster by a central Argo CD installation. I remember back then we saw this...