Argo + Armory: Cross-environment orchestration made easy

Cross-environment orchestration that you don’t have to spend time building

At Armory, our goal is software innovation, whether that’s our own Continuous Deployment solutions, or being able to help our customers reach higher innovation peaks within their software development. We’ve taken deliberate steps to make sure our products play well with others, with a focus on products that have already helped streamline the DevOps practice and software development lifecycle – like Argo.

Argo is a community favorite for a good reason. It is an open-source continuous delivery solution for Kubernetes that offers an on-premise solution with a simple syncing of your Git repo with your Kubernetes cluster experience. 

Argo with the orchestration power of Armory, enables simple and declarative automated orchestration for cross-environment deployment promotion. Commit your code and watch it automatically deploy from dev to staging and on to production – no matter how many environments you have. Argo bolstered with Armory integrates and orchestrates existing automation like security scanning, while enabling manual or automated approvals at any stage of your deployment, so your deployments remain secure, reliable, safe, automated, and continuous. 

Armory can also deploy multiple Kubernetes manifests together and jointly decide whether to proceed or rollback for all, while leveraging advanced progressive strategies like Blue/Green and Canary, including Automated Canary Analysis, so you can improve your developers’ experience and assure your customers’ experience while you’re rapidly improving it.

Focus more of your time on improving your developers’ experience and building real business value with Argo + Armory.

What is Argo?

Argo is a set of tools for Kubernetes to run workflows and manage clusters, with GitOps experience. ArgoCD is a declarative, GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes. Argo Rollouts is a Kubernetes controller and set of CRDs which provide deployment capabilities such as blue/green, canary, canary analysis, and experimentation, to Kubernetes.

What does ArgoCD do?

ArgoCD is implemented as a Kubernetes controller that continuously monitors running applications to compare the current state against the desired target state. A deployed application whose live state deviates from the target state is considered out of sync. ArgoCD reports & visualizes the differences while providing facilities to sync the live state back to the desired target state. Any modifications made to the desired target state in the Git repo can be automatically applied and reflected in the specified target environments.

What does Argo Rollouts do?

Argo Rollouts will manage the creation and deletion of ReplicaSets. These ReplicaSets are defined by a field inside the custom ‘Rollout’ resource. The controller will use the strategy set within a field in order to determine how the rollout will progress from the old ReplicaSet to the new ReplicaSet.

Why is Argo a DevOps Community Favorite?

ArgoCD and Argo Rollouts make Canary and Blue/Green deployments simple with a declarative experience.

ArgoCD is really good at syncing what is in your Git repo with your Kubernetes cluster, and it gives you insight into when things are out of sync or become unhealthy. The insights also include which apps are running and which versions the apps are running, using a cluster-centric view. 

Argo Rollouts provides deployment strategies to individual clusters, beyond the basic RollingDeploy that Kubernetes provides. 

Since Argo is open source, it runs entirely on your infrastructure as an on-premise solution which many platform engineering teams and DevOps practitioners can prefer.

Save Time with Argo and Armory

We’ve seen how well Argo and Armory can work together firsthand. Here are some highlights.

Operational Flexibility and Business Agility: 

• Scale your deployments and improve your developers’ experience
• Deploy Argo Rollouts to multiple K8s clusters/environments, automatically promoting the deployment from one environment to the next
• End-to-end automation from code commit to production with easy cluster management
• No need to reinvent the declarative deployment wheel – if you have Argo, you don’t need to “lift and shift” to achieve fully automated Continuous Deployment using Armory
• Work with your current Continuous Integration product
• A simple UI to keep track of your deployments across all environments

Increased Stability and Accelerated Time-to-Market: 

• DevOps teams save time and speed up their iterations process when they transition from continuous delivery to continuous deployment
• Armory reduces change failures to under 5% using advanced progressive strategies like Blue/Green and Canary including Automated Canary Analysis using your observability data, in any environment, not just production
• Armory orchestrates the complete deployment, not just updates to the replicaset. If you deploy additional objects, such as a configMap or a secret, and only those additional objects change, the replicaset will be restarted and the same production validation will be run. This ensures that the other changed manifests are picked up by the new version.
• You can trigger Armory easily from any branch; wherever you are doing things today

Armory’s Continuous Deployment Advantage

Teams that use Armory are able to adopt Continuous Deployment at any scale easily. They can scale not only their deployments and software but also their time and abilities. Armory enables teams to focus more time on their unique value, their competitive advantages and scaling their business, rather than managing infrastructure and tooling. 

From a philosophical perspective, Armory is a company filled with people and users where innovation is at the heart of everything we do. Individuals and teams that thrive with Armory are agile-focused and have a blameless, fail-forward mindset. 

Improve your developers’ experience and add Continuous Deployment at scale to your roadmap. Get in touch with us, we’d love to talk to you. You can also try Armory Continuous Deployment-as-a-Service with your Argo today or check out our quick start guide.