A survey of 185 software development professionals who have adopted the Argo continuous delivery (CD) platform finds that 97% are now using it in production environments, with 60% running Argo for more than two years. Only 10% of respondents are still evaluating Argo.

Conducted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) that oversees the development of Argo, the survey finds 42% now oversee more than 500 applications per Argo CD instance, with 25% connecting those instances to more than 20 clusters. More than three-quarters of respondents are managing six or fewer instances of Argo, the survey finds.

Originally developed by Intuit, Argo provides access to a graphical user interface that enables software engineers to declaratively manage workflows in much the same way Kubernetes clusters are managed. As such, there is close alignment between the adoption of Argo and Kubernetes. Nearly 60% of respondents said 75% or more of their applications are running on Kubernetes clusters. When it comes to installing Argo, Helm is the most widely used tool (71%).

Argo has been at the forefront of decoupling continuous integration (CI) processes used mainly by application developers and CD workflows that are more typically managed by software engineering teams. Rather than trying to extend CI scripts to handle deployments, Argo CD provides access to graphical tools that make it simpler to keep track of changes as they are continuously reconciled.

Dan Garfield, Argo maintainer and vice president of open source at Octopus Deploy, said adoption has also benefited from the rise of GitOps and platform engineering as methodologies for managing application development. In fact, 37% of respondents identified themselves as platform engineers.

Overall, Argo achieved a Net Promoter Score of 79, so the probability that Argo will continue to gain traction is high, especially following the release of Argo CD 3.0 earlier this year, said Garfield.

There are, however, still challenges to be addressed, especially when it comes to environment promotion, noted Garfield. Most teams still rely on manual processes or custom scripts to move applications between environments. Emerging tools like GitOps Promoter, Kargo and Codefresh GitOps that automate that task are gaining attention, but a standard solution has yet to emerge, he added.

It’s not clear to what degree Argo is transforming DevOps. Many of the existing approaches to CD are based on CI pipelines that have been extended to CD. Argo enables a more continuous approach based on a set of continuous GitOps workflows using a set of declarative tools. While most DevOps teams make extensive use of CI pipelines to build software, much of the deployment process is still manual. Argo CD proponents are making a case for a more loosely coupled approach that makes it simpler to automate deployments. That capability will become critical as the pace at which applications are being built and deployed exponentially increases in the age of artificial intelligence, noted Garfield.

Regardless of the approach to application development, the need to revisit the DevOps workflow is becoming increasingly apparent. The only issue left to determine now is which platforms are best is best suited to the furtherance of that goal.