Introduction
Argo is a collection of four independent GitOps focused open-source tools - Argo Workflows, Argo CD, Argo Rollouts, and Argo Events — that help development and DevOps teams use GitOps fundamentals to run Kubernetes workflows and manage their clusters.
Argo Workflows began at Applatix — later acquired by Intuit — as a framework for designing and orchestrating parallel jobs using a Kubernetes CRD. Argo CD takes a declarative and version-controlled GitOps approach, with massive success stories, like CERN spinning up thousands of nodes and GPUs to crunch data on black holes — and then turning it off again at the flip of a switch.
Argo Rollouts and Argo Events build off that robust foundation with advanced deployments and workflow automation. If you want, you can run any Argo tool independently or chain them together for customizable and repeatable deployments.
In this project journey report, we'll let GitHub data guide you through the remarkable growth journey Argo has experienced under CNCF's wing. We can't attribute every data point to specific inputs, but we can document and explore the correlations in search of successful decisions and actions. This report is part of a series of product journey reports published by the CNCF.
Jesse Suen made the first commit to Argo's GitHub repo on October 17, 2017. After years of multi-vendor and multi-end user development, Argo donated all four projects and was welcomed into the CNCF as an incubating project on April 7, 2020.
* These statistics were collected with the DevStats tool, which CNCF built in collaboration with CNCF project communities. When we talk about “Contributor,” we mean somebody who made a review, commented, committed, or created a PR or issue.
The Argo project and community by the numbers:
Contributors
Code commits
Pull requests
Contributions
Contributing companies
Without open source, and if you're only building for your organization, you have a narrow focus. Open source forces you to consider the use cases of other organization's needs, and it helps shape it to be an overall better product at the end of the day.
Jesse Suen
Co-founder and CTO of Akuity
Code
Diversity
Argo's four projects have increased in velocity and adoption thanks to healthy coordination and shared vision among its major vendor and end-user contributing communities. Since joining CNCF, Argo has tallied contributions from more than 1,900 organizations.
The Argo team diligently maintains a healthy balance between the communities and their often disparate needs. Now that Argo is an incubating project within the CNCF, vendor and end-user contributors see value in the governance structure and guaranteed longevity — and they understand that Argo is not subject to the whims of any one company. Active vendor contributors include Intuit, Codefresh, Akuity, and RedHat. End users like Blackrock have contributed entire projects — Argo Events — and dozens more organizations like Swiss Post, Dyno, Alibaba.com, and Commonwealth Computer Research actively contribute today.
Diversity Across Company Size and Type to-date (End User, Vendor, Foundation)
code since Argo joined CNCF
100+ individual
Argo contributors
Top 3 Countries
contributing code
The diversity of company contributors, and the healthy balance of vendor<->end user input, continues to fuel growth and give users confidence in choosing Argo tools for accelerating their Kubernetes workflows.
When we started, we built Argo for CI/CD, the 'boring' stuff, but then we started to get interesting use cases... I never imagined Argo could be used to process CERN data for the Large Hadron Collider. It just blows my mind to see how useful Argo is outside of its original intent.
Jesse Suen
Co-founder and CTO of Akuity
Cumulative growth of Argo Contributions by company from Q3 2017 - Q3 2022
Percentage breakdown of Argo Contributions by company from Q3 2017 - Q3 2022
Cumulative number of companies Q3 2017 - Q3 2022
Cumulative growth in contributors Q3 2017 - Q3 2022
Geographic Diversity
of Contributors
Top contributing Countries
Percentage Contributors to Argo by Country
I remember the old days of our Slack channel, which was just me, Jesse, and other core contributors trying to answer questions about Argo Workflows. I could feel the difference, after one or two months, where community members joined, but not just to ask questions. I saw healthy interaction between community members, helping each other and answering questions without help from core contributors. That was the moment I felt the community was working and getting bigger.
Hong Wang
Founder and CEO of Akuity
Development
Velocity
Monthly velocity of Argo
Based on velocity metrics since joining CNCF, Argo is undoubtedly growing at a robust and sustainable pace.
One way we track developer velocity is a simple formula — commits + PRs + issues + authors — over time. We also look at the cumulative contributors throughout Argo's history, and both illustrate that Argo's formula of multiple vendors and end users creates healthy, grassroots support.
Growth of Argo pull requests, code commits, issues, and authors over time
Education, Events
and Sponsorship
The more a project's community participates in education, events, and sponsorship, the healthier the project tends to be.
On the educational side, Codefresh launched the GitOps Certification with Argo In January 2022. As of August 2022, the program is celebrating more than 10,000 students progressing through the three courses or leveraging their GitOps Fundamental certificate in the real world.
The first ArgoCon was held virtually in December 2021 and amassed more than 4,000 attendees, 25 speakers, and support from Intuit, Codefresh, and Red Hat.
ArgoCon 2022
ArgoCon 2022 (September 19-21, 2022), in Mountain View, California has dozens of breakout sessions for roadmap updates, hands-on workshops, lightning talks, use case walkthroughs, and more. The sponsorship slate is already full, with major support from Adobe, Akuity, Codefresh, Harness, Intuit, Red Hat, and many more.
I don't think you could have a vibrant, multi-vendor product like Argo without end-user participation. Without them, it would be a project that's primarily sponsored or dominated by one vendor. End-user involvement in the community is essential.
Ed Lee
Founder of Applatix
Marketing Growth
and Programs
Upon Argo joining CNCF in Q3 2020, we've worked diligently to spread awareness of Argo and expand its community through two core principles:
- Solving real problems and being genuine with our audiences.
- Listening to all inputs from vendors and end users to maintain balance and generate excitement.
Thanks to these efforts, Argo's reach continues to grow rapidly, with Argo CD now in use at Capital One, Deloitte, Electronic Arts, MariaDB, PagerDuty, Sumo Logic, and other major organizations.
ArgoCon in Dec 21
Slack channels
twitter.com/argoproj
Project
Documentation
Cloud native projects can't exist without robust documentation for educating new users and helping existing users solve problems. A healthy velocity of documentation changes is a great signal for the health of a project's community.
Since joining CNCF, hundreds of contributors from many backgrounds and motivations have added to and polished Argo's documentation.
Commits
committed docs
*Documentation for Argo is authored in .md files. CNCF uses the DevStats tool to automatically collect and count statistics of all relevant .md files in the Argo repositories in GitHub.
Growth in participation in Argo project documentation (Q1 2017 - Q3 2022)
Cumulative growth of Argo project documentation commits (Q1 2017 - Q3 2022)
Conclusion
CNCF is committed to fostering and sustaining an ecosystem of open source, vendor-neutral projects by democratizing state-of-the-art software development and deployment patterns to make technology accessible for everyone.
We hope this report is a useful portrait into how CNCF fosters and sustains the growth of Argo's projects, its team, and its founding principles.
Thank You
Your comments and feedback are welcome at hello@cncf.io