ArgoCon ’21 — That’s a wrap on Argo’s first conference!
Huge thank you to all the sponsors, attendees, speakers, and staff that made this event a huge success. ArgoCon ’21 was the very first Argo conference and we were blown away to host nearly 4000 registrants! There is no doubt that the Argo project is incredibly popular and has a huge community behind it. Here’s some more info about who attended:
- 1500+ different companies represented
- Registrants from 90 countries on 6 continents
- 46% of registrants attended live
- 94.4% of attendees rated the event a “4” or “5” for an overall rating of 4.6 out of 5
- 1500+ chat messages across the event hub and session talks with amazing feedback; like this one!
This was of course, because of our amazing speakers! Pratik Wadher, Kelsey Hightower, Aya Ivtsan, Christian Hernandez, Hannah Seligson, and many others gave excellent talks on their usage of Argo CD, Argo Workflows, Argo Rollouts, and Argo Events. If you missed any sessions you can catch them on Youtube.
- ArgoCon ’21 Keynotes Youtube playlist
- Youtube Playlist for ArgoCon ‘21
- ArgoCon ’21 Event site with all talks and schedule
Hui Kang from Salesforce shared how they performance test Argo Rollouts at a massive scale. Edgar Magana showed how Splunk uses Argo CD and Argo Workflows in multi-region & multi-cell environments. Sergio Méndez took us through deploying Argo CD and Workflows on the edge using K3s. Ian McGraw gave a masterclass on building event drive machine learning using Argo Workflows. And there are many more excellent talks not listed here! The speakers represented some of the most demanding and secure environments in the world today.
The CFP process was very competitive so if you submitted a talk and didn’t get accepted, do not be discouraged! Many talks that we weren’t able to fit into the schedule would have been excellent and we’re working on providing some additional opportunities for community talks in the future. Overall there were 49 talks submitted with an acceptance rate of 24%.
A big shout-out also needs to go to Codefresh, Intuit, and Red Hat for partnering up to host the event and providing all the heavy lifting to make the event happen.
Diamond Sponsors: Akuity, Codefresh, Intuit, Red Hat
Gold Sponsors: BlackRock, Pipekit, Shipa, Spectro Cloud
Sara Davila from Codefresh did a great job emceeing the event but one area of improvement we found was increasing diverse representation. While speakers came from all walks of life with diverse backgrounds, of the 25 speakers, only 3 were female. As we think about planning ArgoCon ’22, improving representation will be a big focus! We know there are many great female Argo users willing to give talks because we had great representation at GitOpsCon and we’ll have to do more work to improve representation next year.
We’re already working on planning ArgoCon ’22 based on the feedback we received from attendees. (That pesky auto-mute will definitely be going away!) We look forward to seeing the community continue to grow and all of the amazing use cases that you find for using Argo!
ArgoCon ’21 Credits
Event Oversight Committee
- Dan Garfield (Codefresh)
- Henrik Blixt (Intuit)
- Christian Hernandez (RedHat)
Events Team
- Sara Davila (Codefresh)
- Sharon Chitayat (Codefresh)
Platform Sponsor — Tech Strong TV
- Deb Schalm
- Beverly Fish
- Jackie Whetzel
- Sofia Orlova
- Brian Yaskulka
- Paul Gustafson
- Andrew Weener (AV team)
- Rose Watson (Marketing)
- Carolyn Phipps (Marketing)
- Leah Van Zee (Marketing)
