CNCF-hosted Co-located Events Europe 2025

If you’re running a multicluster environment—and really, who isn’t?—you can face challenges scaling deployments across your fleet no matter how big. Agent-based solutions can often be the best option to solve this.

The Argo CD Agent is a lightweight solution that helps Argo CD deployments scale more easily. The agent is quite notable in that it doesn’t require a permanent network connection and is lightweight and extensible allowing workload clusters to stay autonomous. In this session we will take a technical deep dive into the agent architecture.

We will demonstrate how to deploy the agent using the implementation of the Sig-Multicluster specification found in the Open Cluster Manager (OCM-io) project. Using OCM-io’s Add-on framework and the Argo CD Agent you’ll see how these two community tools and open standards help you with managing your GitOps at scale more reliably.

You probably have more than one cluster and there is a decent chance you are using Argo CD. Additionally, it is quite likely that you have a few other variations of Kubernetes cluster lists. We posit that writing glue code to stitch together these clusters lists is not an awesome use of your time. Thankfully the good folks in SIG-Multicluster built this super cool api for cluster lists, cluster profile/cluster inventory! We are going to show you how to use said fancy new list with Argo CD along with other multi-cluster tools across Kubernetes clusters hosted by different providers. There will be demos. Possibly Mustaches. And a decent amount of awful puns. So come on down to bear witness to some sweet multi-cluster abstractions that will surely get your heart rate up.

Have you ever found yourself increasing the Argo CD controller CPU? Give it more memory? The answer is most likely yes, multiple times! But there comes a time when enough is enough. In this talk, we will go over as many scalability symptoms as possible, understand why they happen and how to mitigate them. You will learn that most of the time, increasing the resources is only a temporary fix. Our goal will be to dive deeper into each problem to find the underlying root cause, and apply a solution that addresses the problem at its source to have a lasting fix.
CPU consumption, reconciliation cycles, operation queues, cluster watches, monorepos and much more are on the agenda.

Workflow specs can be pretty complicated, involving references to many different templates and WorkflowTemplates with nested container or script definitions. Outside of using argo lint, how do you make sure your complicated Workflow definition is valid and legit? The community has raised similar questions/concerns in Issue #13503.

In this talk, we'd like to share how we utilize Kubernetes' Validating Webhooks and Argo Workflow's validating function to address this concern to make sure every Argo Workflow resource submitted into our system not only uses valid specifications, but also references valid templates with the correct parameters.

In order to manage a Kubernetes fleet of more than 400 clusters across 7 different types of cloud providers in over 22 regions, Adobe’s Kubernetes team has embraced GitOps at a massive scale. Leveraging Cluster API (CAPI), Amazon Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK), Argo CD, Argo Workflows, Prometheus and other Kubernetes controllers, fleet management was changed from a heavy burden to a tactical advantage. This talk covers what are top learnings of using GitOps in a way that is able to be used in production across a large organization, integrating CNCF projects have helped them scale the operations with a relatively small staff of engineers. You’ll see how through an exclusively open source toolchain Adobe was able to deploy thousands of changes a month, safely, securely, and with confidence.

As we deploy, operate and manage an ever growing amount of clusters, and extend our cloud native applications to (far) edge locations, across regions, data centers, and environments, the current multi-cluster architecture of Argo CD is hitting its limits. To face this challenge we need to be ambitious: let’s revolutionize the multi-cluster story of Argo CD and enable it to scale out to the edge, all while keeping a central control plane.

In this talk, we will discover the new community-driven Argoproj-Labs project argocd-agent, that inverts the paradigm of the current Argo CD multi-cluster architecture; instead of having Argo CD connect to the clusters it manages, it lets those clusters connect to Argo CD through an agent.

Looking at some of the challenges and caveats that you face with the current multi-cluster architecture in Argo CD, we’ll explore how the agent model can improve scalability, reliability and security for large-scale Argo CD multi-cluster setups.