Argo CD v3.0 Release Candidate
We are very excited to announce an important milestone for Argo with the Argo CD 3.0 release candidate! This is the first major version change to Argo CD since 2021.
Argo CD 3.0 brings improvements to security, performance and distills dozens of best practices to provide better defaults while still allowing for flexible configuration to match any team. This release represents a more mature Argo CD that removes deprecated components and streamlines future development and maintenance.
Let’s jump into what’s new!
Better Security with Fine-grained update/delete RBAC enforcement on resources
Fine-grained controls introduce the ability to change permissions based not just on the application but on the resources within an application. This new permissions model will require a configuration upgrade from Argo CD 2.x. Thanks to @fffinkel and @agaudreault for this contribution.
Here’s an example of giving permissions to delete pods within an application.
p, example-user, applications, delete/*/Pod/*/*, default/prod-app, allowBetter defaults across the board
Every Argo CD admin has changes they like to make when setting up a new installation. Several of these configurations have become best practices or necessities. Some of the new defaults include:
- Use annotations for resource tracking (#22289 by @terrytangyuan and @crenshaw-dev)
- Enable RBAC on pod logging by default just like we do for container exec. (#10551 by @reggie-k and @rumstead)
- Ignore differences on high churn controller managed resources like those from Cert Manager, Kyverno, Cilium, and Kubernetes. (#19992, #20013 by @agaudreault)
- Adopt JSON as default logging format (#20897 by @teddy-wahle)
- Deprecated and removed Configuring repos in argocd-cm (#19768 by @crenshaw-dev)
Other notable features and issues tackled in Argo CD 3.0 can be found on GitHub.
Recommendations on Secrets
Argo CD documentation contains a number of recommendations but secrets management in Kubernetes was in a rapid state of development when Argo CD 2.0 launched. Since then we have noticed a number of emerging anti-patterns and have made the decision to publish recommendations on secrets management. (#21629 by @crenshaw-dev)
Specifically, we endorse using secrets operators and caution against using config management plugins to inject secrets. We recommend reading the updated documentation on secrets.
Upgrading from Argo CD 2.x to Argo CD 3.0
Argo CD 3.0 should be a low risk upgrade. We’ve put together a full guide to upgrading to Argo CD 3.0. This includes how to identify if a configuration needs to be changed and if applicable how to retain Argo CD 2.x behavior.
Beyond following the full guide above, all potentially breaking changes can be found on Github.
Ongoing and End of Life Support for Argo CD 2.x
Following our documented release cadence and security policy we support the last three minor releases for security fixes and critical issues. This means the last version of Argo CD (2.14) will go out of support with the release of 3.2, currently planned for the end of 2025.
A huge thank you to the more than 94 contributors who helped with this release as well as our release champion Regina Voloshin as well as the Argo CD lead Michael Crenshaw. Since we announced Argo CD 3.0 many have offered feedback, contributions, and ideas.
