👋 Hello, innovators!
YouTube recently hit 9,500+ subscribers – yay! 😊 The push to 10,000 continues. 🙏
I’m happy to share that the first chapter of The Essentials Series courses are published, focusing on an AWS landing zone along with awesome quality of life boosts for systems engineers.
Additionally, I have 2 new podcast episodes with thoughts and rants on system things. 😉
👉 Have a question for me? Hit up my Questions Inbox or message me on LinkedIn and I’ll address it in an upcoming newsletter issue! You’ll also get a shout-out. 😊
This question comes Martin, asking:
What makes you a big fan of ArgoCD?
Great question! In Platform Truths, I hint a bit on my desire to both keep your Terraform / IaC code limited in scope and scale and embrace Helm charts & ArgoCD applications. This came from the pain of learning. 😁
Early on, I treated everything as a Terraform problem. That led to messy state management and conflicts with domain teams. Not everyone wants to wrestle with Terraform, and I get that. My course correction? Learning alternative models! And that’s how I found GitOps and ultimately ArgoCD.
I think the superpower of GitOps is the ability to abstract a giant swath of “we don’t care about this” parts of the application stack away. Configuration becomes something you deploy. It’s not the universal answer to all things, but there are many use cases that fit well with this model. ArgoCD is nice because it is designed for the GitOps model, understands what is going on, and allows you to tightly control what happens to the deployment when a configuration changes without having to wait around for a CI/CD pipeline.
With GitOps, your Git repository becomes the undisputed, central source of truth. It declaratively defines the entire desired state for your service, including application configurations, Kubernetes manifests, and environment-specific settings, all version-controlled in one place. You no longer guess what should be running; you look at Git.
ArgoCD then operationalizes this truth. It continuously monitors the specified Git repository paths and automatically ensures the live cluster state converges to match the configuration defined in Git, handling the complexities of applying changes, pruning old resources, or managing sync phases and approvals according to your predefined rules.
GitOps driven by ArgoCD delivers highly consistent and reliable deployments. By automating the synchronization between the Git source of truth and the live cluster state, ArgoCD acts to reduce manual interventions. This minimizes the potential for human error and actively prevents configuration drift by continuously reconciling the cluster against the desired state defined in Git.
ArgoCD ensures this consistency isn’t limited to a single environment; it natively supports deploying applications uniformly across multiple clusters and integrates seamlessly with various templating tools like Helm and Kustomize, applying your desired state faithfully regardless of the underlying complexity.
(And yes, this often means managing more declarative YAML, but consistency is usually worth it!) 😂
GitOps inherently provides a transparent audit trail for every intended change to your applications and infrastructure configuration. Because every modification to the desired state must be captured as a commit in the Git repository, you automatically gain a complete, immutable history. This log details precisely what changed, who proposed and approved the change (via Git authorship and potential PRs), when it occurred, and ideally why (via commit messages).
This level of built-in traceability is invaluable for compliance requirements, security reviews, and forensic analysis during incident response. ArgoCD relies on this Git history, ensuring its actions correspond directly to this auditable record and making it simple to understand the sequence of events leading to the current deployed state.
GitOps practices implemented with ArgoCD improve both the speed of recovery from failures and the overall resilience of your system. If a newly deployed change introduces errors, reverting is exceptionally fast and straightforward: simply trigger a rollback to a previous, known-good commit in your Git history. Leveraging this version-controlled source of truth, ArgoCD reliably synchronizes the cluster back to the desired state defined by that earlier commit, significantly reducing Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR).
Beyond deployment rollbacks, ArgoCD actively safeguards against configuration drift. It constantly monitors the live cluster state, automatically detecting any deviations from the Git definition caused by manual changes or external factors. ArgoCD can then be configured to automatically revert these unauthorized modifications, ensuring the cluster consistently adheres to its intended state and maintaining operational integrity and compliance.
GitOps practices facilitated by ArgoCD enhance team collaboration and provide strong governance and operational insight. By standardizing changes through Git workflows like PRs (Pull Requests), teams benefit from inherent peer reviews, automated validation checks, and explicit approval processes before any configuration changes are merged and deployed, promoting safer and higher-quality releases. ArgoCD further strengthens control with granular Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and multi-tenancy features, ensuring secure access and operational boundaries suitable for large organizations and complex multi-team environments.
Critically, ArgoCD offers exceptional real-time visibility through its comprehensive web UI, clearly displaying application sync status, health metrics, deployment history, and live vs. desired state differences, which significantly simplifies monitoring, troubleshooting, and understanding the current state of deployed services. I’m a big fan of the UI!
I suppose we all handle a mid-life crisis differently, and mine seems to be coming in the form of urban farming. 🤣 Jokes aside, a component of wanting to become self-employed was to free up time to lean into the idea of self-reliance and less dependency on “the grid” in an urban neighborhood.
Why? Primarily because I think lawns are useless with a negative impact on biodiversity and starves your good insects (bees, dragonflies, butterflies) of nutrition. But also because grocery prices are going up, grocery quality seems to be going down, and it doesn’t take much land to produce food for a family.
I’m starting slow. Austin is hardiness zone 8b and supports a number of sun loving plants that produce lots of tasty food and can quickly bounce back from the winter freezes or just be re-planted from seed or a local nursery.
Given my love for tomatoes, I’m trying out an indeterminate (vining) tomato called Sun Sugar, and a determinate (bushing) tomato called Salsa Roma. The stakes are pruned palm tree fronds.
Our little tomato friends are in pots to test out the best spots to build out their future beds. I’ll be building raised planters with a Florida weave trellis because I find that method simple and beautiful, along with olla pots to regulate moisture.
The tomatoes will be joined by basil and marigolds to help with pests. Basil has traditionally done well for me here. I have a ton of other herbs and pepper plants but none of them look all that interesting just yet.
Each season I’ll add new experiments and continue forward with successful combinations.
Here are some fun, interesting, and educational links that I’ve gathered to share with you.
The Good Work folks ask “What does Palantir actually do?“
I only recently realized that Microsoft Office has a virtual whiteboard.
Reader Will shares the open source project Pike, which is “a tool to determine the minimum permissions required to run a TF/IAC run.” Time to try this with some of my Terraform modules! More soon.
The folks at Veritasium did an amazing job going deep into the Ingenuity Mars helicopter, how it became a thing, the budget around it, and all of the missions it flew on Mars.
I enjoyed this Einzelgänger video titled The More You Resist, The Worse It Gets. Scratch that inner Taoist itch with this one.
Curious about dictators and how they rise (and remain) in power? The folks at Wired did a Tech Support video with professor and authoritarianism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Superb content, level up your education with this one.
That’s it for this issue! Let’s talk again soon. ✌️& 💙
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