CNCF Argo Project 2022 User Survey Results
Summary
The 2022 Argo CD and Rollouts user survey feedback exposed a vibrant and growing global community. This year, 147 respondents offered a view into their usage and adoption. (92 responses for CD/Rollouts, 55 responses for Workflows/Events).
Argo CD/Rollouts
- 80%+ of the respondents have adopted Argo CD in production and 66% have been in production for more than 6 months. Demonstrating a strong adoption rate which is in line with the CNCF Annual Survey 2021 insight — “Most notable is the 115% year-on-year increase in Argo’s in-production use.”
- The NPS score came in at an excellent 72, an amazing 4 points increase from last year.
Argo Workflows/Events
- 75% of the respondents have adopted Argo Workflows in production and 50% have been in production for more than 6 months.
- The NPS score came in at a great 48.
Argo CD & Rollouts
Why users like and use Argo CD and Rollouts!
“It’s the best!”
“Best GitOps option available!”
“Just worked the nicest.”
“Simplicity and flexibility.”
“I fell in love the day I saw it!!”
“Multi tenancy, RBAC, Cloud native!”
“ArgoCD proved to be the best product for our wishes and needs.”
“Community support and adoption. Mature in terms of handling edge cases.”
Job Roles
As expected, the majority of responses came from engineers, either DevOps, SRE or Software Engineer. There is a good percentage increase of architects compared with last year’s survey. That aligns with the increased adoption of Argo CD in production and the corresponding consideration of Argo CD in the overall architecture design.
DevOps Engineers: 45%
Architects: 23%
Site Reliability Engineer: 11%
Software Engineer: 8%
Production Usage
80%+ of the respondents have adopted Argo CD in production and 66% have been in production for more than 6 months. This is an amazing result with close to half using Argo CD in production for more than a year.
Scale and Size
Based on the survey, our users are running fewer than 5 Argo CD instances to manage 50–500 applications as a general pattern. Around 10% of the respondents are running with 500+ applications, which demonstrates Argo CD’s performance and scalability.
Ecosystem
Not surprisingly, ApplicationSet and Notifications projects are being adopted widely. This is a great validation for the Argo CD 2.3 decision to merge those two ecosystem projects into the main project.
The most popular CI solutions mentioned are Jenkins and Github Actions. Github Actions has a quite strong showing this year as it didn’t stand out from the survey last year.
Argo Rollouts
As we can tell, Argo Rollouts are getting healthy traction with close to 3/4 evaluating or using it. We also have good insights into the metric provider and service mesh solutions. Without a doubt, Prometheus is the go-to solution for Argo users. There is also a balanced distribution among Datadog, NewRelic, and Elastic. On the mesh side, Istio and NGINX dominate.
Argo Workflows & Events
Why users like and use Argo Workflows and Events!
“Just the best automation tool :)”
“Ease of installation, Kubernetes Native and rich feature set.”
“Best choice for use for a k8s infra and great community.”
“Looked at Argo, and it checked all the boxes for our use cases.”
“Argo is a close cousin to Oozie in terms of workflow definition and execution semantics.”
“Because it is ‘container-first’ and more dynamic than other solutions. We ran on AWS ECS Fargate before and decided to switch to Kubernetes because we liked it so much :)”
Job Roles & Use Cases
An increased percentage of DevOps Engineers is observed this year. That could be from the cross-pollination from other Argo projects. The use case distribution hasn’t changed much from last year. As a general workflow engine, it is continuously being adopted to solve problems in areas of Machine Learning, Infrastructure Automation, Data Processing, etc.
DevOps Engineers: 41%
Software Engineer: 20%
Architects: 20%
Data Engineer / Data Scientist / ML Engineer: 13%
Scale
- Most users are running fewer than 1000 workflows a day, 9 users report running 1000s of workflows a day.
- Most workflows have fewer than 1000 pods, some users also report running 1000s pods per workflow.
Ecosystem
Kubeflow pipelines use Argo Workflows by default under the hood to orchestrate Kubernetes resources. So it is not surprising that 30% of Argo Workflows users are using Kubeflow Pipeline. It is a bit surprising to see 50% using Airflow at the same time. Both orchestration systems are co-existing at quite a lot of companies.
Final Words
Thank you for taking the time to participate in the 2022 Argo User Survey! The feedback and data are crucial to drive the milestones and validate the Argo development directions.
An extra big Thank You to everyone who also showed a willingness to come and present at an Argo community meeting, do a user study, provide a quote, or write a blog post. As always, the community welcomes everyone to participate and contribute!
