Technical requirements – Continuous Deployment/ Delivery with Argo CD

In the previous chapter, we looked at one of the key aspects of modern DevOps – continuous integration (CI ). CI is the first thing most organizations implement when they embrace DevOps,but things don’t end with CI, which only delivers a tested build in an artifact repository. Instead, we would also want to deploy the artifact to our environments. In this chapter, we’ll implement the next part of the DevOps toolchain – continuous deployment/delivery (CD).

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• The importance of CD and automation

• CD models and tools

• The Blog App and its deployment configuration

• Continuous declarative IaC using an Environment repository

• Introduction to Argo CD

• Installing and setting up Argo CD

• Managing sensitive configurations and secrets

• Deploying the sample Blog App

Technical requirements

In this chapter, we will spin up a cloud-based Kubernetes cluster, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), for the exercises. At the time of writing, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides a free $300 trial for 90 days, so you can go ahead and sign up for one at https://console.cloud.google.com/.

You will also need to clone the following GitHub repository for some exercises: https://github.

com/PacktPublishing/Modern-DevOps-Practices.

Run the following command to clone the repository into your home directory, and cd into the ch12 directory to access the required resources:

$ git clone https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Modern-DevOps-Practices-2e.git \ modern-devops

$ cd modern-devops/ch12

So, let’s get started!