Introduction
Argo CD is a Kubernetes-native GitOps continuous delivery tool that enables declarative application management by syncing the desired state of workloads from Git repositories directly into Kubernetes clusters.
Built by the CNCF community, Argo CD automates the deployment of Kubernetes manifests, Helm charts, and Kustomize configurations using Git as the source of truth. At Cake, Argo CD plays a central role in ensuring that every application deployment, infrastructure change, and configuration update is auditable, consistent, and version-controlled.
The Cake platform’s uses for Argo CD include:
Declarative GitOps Workflow: Uses Git repositories to define and track the desired state of applications and infrastructure, enforcing reproducibility and traceability.
Automated Continuous Delivery: Continuously monitors Git repositories for changes and applies them to target clusters—keeping environments always in sync with source control.
Secure Multi-Tenant Support: Offers fine-grained role-based access control (RBAC), project isolation, and secrets integration for secure operation across teams and services.
Visual Insights and Diffing: Provides a user-friendly web UI and CLI to visualize deployment health, compare live vs. desired state, and manage sync strategies with full audit trails.
Customizable Sync Strategies: Supports automated, manual, and pipeline-triggered syncs with hooks, waves, and validation steps to fit a wide variety of deployment workflows.
In the Cake platform, Argo CD is the backbone of our Kubernetes GitOps strategy—managing everything from application microservices to Crossplane-managed infrastructure. It integrates seamlessly with GitHub Actions, Helm, and Kubernetes RBAC to enable end-to-end automation from code commit to cluster deployment.
This documentation will walk through how Argo CD is used at Cake, including its integration patterns, app configuration practices, syncing behaviors, promotion strategies across environments (e.g., dev → staging → prod), and operational best practices.
By adopting Argo CD, Cake ensures that deployments are safe, auditable, and fully automated—empowering developers to ship confidently while maintaining strict platform control and governance.