Argo CD & Rollouts 2023 User Survey Results

The Argo CD & Rollouts user survey provides a wealth of information about the experiences and opinions of the community using this open-source GitOps and Progressive Delivery engine. With responses from a diverse range of users, the survey sheds light on which features and capabilities are most valued and areas where improvements and enhancements could be made. By analyzing this feedback, the Argo CD and Rollouts team can better understand the needs of our users and work to ensure that future releases are even more useful and user-friendly.

This year, 155 respondents offered a view into their usage and adoption of Argo CD and Rollouts. In this post, we will take a closer look at the key findings from the survey and explore what they mean for the project's future.

Argo CD

Argo CD has made significant strides since last year, with an impressive Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 76, and 93% of respondents use Argo CD in their production environments. This high adoption rate and user satisfaction are a testament to the project’s success in providing a reliable and efficient tool that simplifies the deployment process and helps organizations easily achieve their goals.

Argo Rollouts

This is our first time collecting Argo Rollouts’ NPS independently from Argo CD. It’s great to see Rollouts stand independently with an NPS of 35.

Argo CD

Why do users like and use Argo CD?

Let’s hear it straight from the users:

• “One of the biggest positives about Argo CD is the resource UI. I have found it educational and beneficial for anybody starting to learn or barely familiar with Kubernetes.”
• “The WebUI to get a quick and easy understanding of all the Kubernetes resources in an application context”
• “One of the best pieces of software I’ve ever used. Provides an important feature set and works wonderfully.“
• GitOps: “Self Service”
• “ApplicationSets”
• “Drift Detection”
• “Auto sync!”
• “Upgrades are a breeze.”

Job Roles

The split of respondents’ roles mirrors the current trends observed by the CNCF, indicating an upward trend in the field of platform engineering. Most respondents were engineers, notably DevOps Engineers, Platform Engineers, and Architects. Moreover, the number of Application/Software Engineers and SREs significantly declined from last year’s survey, indicating a shift towards platform engineering within our community.

• DevOps Engineers: 42.5%
• Platform Engineers: 24.6%
• Architects: 12.7%
• Site Reliability Engineer: 4.5%
• Application / Software Engineer: 4.4%

Production Usage

Production usage has seen great growth over the last year. Over 93% of the respondents have adopted Argo CD in production, and 75% have been in production for more than 6 months!

Scale and Size

The survey results on Argo CD usage are interesting, particularly because over 75% of the respondents have 1 to 5 Argo CD instances.

The survey results on the distribution of the number of Argo CD applications reveal that 45% of respondents have between 50 and 500 applications, indicating that organizations with moderate-sized deployments widely adopt Argo CD. With 16% of respondents having more than 500 applications, it’s evident that Argo CD provides value to various organizations and is a popular choice for managing deployments.

These findings indicate that a broad range of organizations is using Argo CD. They also suggest that Argo CD provides value to organizations with varying levels of infrastructure complexity and that the tool is easy enough to set up and use even for those with fewer resources. Overall, this is a promising sign for the future growth and adoption of Argo CD.

Ecosystem

According to the survey results, combining Argo CD with GitHub Actions and Terraform is one of the most popular toolsets for managing deployments to Kubernetes clusters. This toolset provides a streamlined development workflow that automates the build, test, and deployment of application code changes and infrastructure changes through infrastructure as code. With this toolset, teams can achieve greater efficiency and consistency in their deployment processes. In particular, GitHub Actions is a popular choice for continuous integration, while Terraform is a leading infrastructure as a code tool. Combined with Argo CD, these tools provide a powerful platform for managing Kubernetes deployments.

In addition to GitHub Actions and Terraform, Jenkins and Argo Workflows are popular tools to use alongside the Argo CD ecosystem. Jenkins is a widely used continuous integration tool that can be integrated with Argo CD to automate build, test, and deployment workflows. Jenkins provides much flexibility in terms of customization and plugins, making it a popular choice for teams with complex CI needs.

Argo Workflows is another powerful tool that can be used for continuous integration in the Argo CD ecosystem. Argo Workflows is designed specifically for Kubernetes and provides a declarative way to define and run complex workflows. With Argo Workflows, teams can define custom workflows for their specific use cases, such as building and deploying microservices. Argo Workflows can also integrate with other tools in the Argo CD ecosystem, such as Argo CD itself and the Argo Rollouts tool for progressive delivery.

Backstage, an open-source platform for building developer portals, has seen growth among users using the Argo ecosystem, particularly Argo CD. Many users have found that Backstage and Argo CD work well together to provide a powerful platform for managing Kubernetes deployments. However, users still need more feedback from users to fully understand how the integration is working and how it can be improved. If you are using Backstage and Argo CD together, we would love to hear about your experiences and how we can continue to improve the integration between these tools.

Opportunities

The recent CNCF 2022 survey results suggest that there is still much opportunity for growth in the GitOps space. According to the survey, 46% of respondents have either just started using GitOps or haven’t started at all, indicating a significant potential market for GitOps solutions like Argo CD. Argo CD has already established itself as a popular choice among users looking for a powerful and flexible GitOps tool. As GitOps adoption continues to grow, Argo CD has the potential to fill the void and become a leader in the space, offering advanced features and integrations to meet the evolving needs of modern application development teams.

Argo Rollouts

Why do users like and use Argo Rollouts?

Let’s hear it straight from the users:

• “How easy it is to substitute a Deployment with a Rollout”
• “Canary without needing any sort of traffic mesh for shaping — this is what decided to go with AR over flagger since reduced complexity”
• “The canary strategy in combination with Istio and traffic mirroring”
• “Automatic rollback”

Job Roles

Like the Argo CD Survey results, the responses regarding role splits from the Argo Rollouts survey are highly reflective of the current trends observed by the CNCF, indicating an upward trend in the field of platform engineering. Most respondents consisted of DevOps Engineers, Platform Engineers, and Architects. Although, unlike the Argo CD results, the number of Application/Software Engineers is just as high as architects.

Argo Rollouts is a tool that focuses on application delivery and management, making it more relevant to application and software engineers responsible for deploying and managing applications. As a result, it is not surprising to see that more of them are working with Argo Rollouts compared to Argo CD, which is more geared towards infrastructure and operations teams.

DevOps Engineers: 28.6%

Platform Engineers: 28.6%

Architects: 14.3%

Application / Software Engineer: 14.3%

Production Usage

Of the respondents of the Argo Rollouts survey, 19% of respondents are evaluating or using Argo Rollouts in development, indicating a growing interest in the tool for managing progressive delivery. Of those who have deployed Argo Rollouts in production, 33.3% have been in production for less than six months, while 47.6% have been in production for six months or longer. This suggests that Argo Rollouts is gaining traction in real-world production environments as more organizations recognize the value of implementing progressive delivery strategies to improve application deployment and management. With a growing community and increasing adoption rates, Argo Rollouts has a bright future as a key tool for managing complex application deployments.

Scale and Size

The survey results also revealed that most respondents using Argo Rollouts have relatively small-scale deployments, with 75% reporting less than 50 applications using Rollouts. However, there were also many respondents with larger deployments, with 10% reporting between 50 and 500 applications, 10% reporting between 500 and 2000 applications, and 5% reporting 2000 or more applications using Rollouts. These results suggest that Argo Rollouts is being used by organizations of varying sizes, from small startups to large enterprises, and that it can scale to meet the needs of even the largest and most complex application environments. As adoption continues to grow, it will be interesting to see how Argo Rollouts evolves to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse user base.

Ecosystem

Unsurprisingly, Prometheus is the most commonly used metric provider with Argo Rollouts. Prometheus provides low latency and efficient data collection as an in-cluster monitoring solution, making it an ideal choice with Argo Rollouts. With the ability to quickly and accurately collect and analyze metrics, Prometheus enables users to make informed decisions and take action in real time, which is critical when it comes to managing and deploying applications with Argo Rollouts. With Prometheus being in-cluster, it is easy for analysis runs to make calls and analyze metrics in real time. This is especially helpful during deployments, as it allows for quick determination of the application's health. This real-time analysis enables faster detection of issues and quicker resolution, making it a valuable tool for ensuring the success of the deployment process. Unsurprisingly, users are leveraging various metric providers with Argo Rollouts. In response, we developed the Metric Provider Plugin Framework, enabling users to build their own plugins and support their unique solutions, even if we do not currently support them.

One of the main benefits of Argo Rollouts is not requiring a traffic manager to use it! Argo Rollouts supports basic canary, which will route a percentage of traffic based on the number of pods currently running. There are some clear favorites for users who participated in the survey and have chosen traffic management solutions.

According to our survey results, the top three traffic management solutions used with Argo Rollouts are Istio, Nginx, and AWS ALB. Still, there are also many other solutions being used alongside them. This inspired us to create the Traffic Router Plugin Framework, which allows users to build their own traffic router plugins and support their own solutions without waiting for our support.

Opportunities

Argo Rollouts has already gained significant traction within the Kubernetes community as a powerful tool for managing progressive delivery. However, there are still many opportunities for growth within the community. For more widespread adoption to occur, there is a need for internal standards to be established around key concepts such as golden signals metrics for application health and more advanced traffic routing strategies. Once these standards are in place, it will become easier for development teams to adopt Argo Rollouts and other progressive delivery tools in a standardized and efficient manner. By establishing these standards and promoting best practices for managing complex application deployments, Argo Rollouts has the potential to become an essential tool in the modern application development toolbox.

Final Words

A big thank you to everyone who completed the Argo surveys this year! Your feedback and insights are invaluable in helping us shape the future of Argo Projects, and we are committed to improving these tools to meet the evolving needs of our users. We look forward to sharing more updates and insights with the Argo community in the coming months, and we thank you for being a part of this journey with us.

An extra big Thank You to everyone who was willing to present at Argo community meetings, do a user study, provide a quote, or write a blog post. As always, the community welcomes everyone to participate and contribute!

And finally, a thank you to Caelan Urquart, Harriet Lawrence, Henrik Blixt, Michael Crenshaw, and all the Argo Maintainers for helping facilitate this survey!