Argo CD 1.7: Autonomous GitOps at Scale

Introduction

The Argo community released Argo CD 1.7 on August 4, 2020, turning GitOps into an autonomous control plane for fleets of clusters. ApplicationSets orchestrate apps across environments, while health plugins and progressive sync policies raise situational awareness.

ApplicationSets Preview

• Define a single ApplicationSet to generate child Application resources per cluster, region, or Git directory.
• Generators pull from cluster registries, Git, Helm repositories, or pull requests, reducing manual duplication.
• Works with multi-tenancy safeguards via Projects, RBAC, and namespace scoping.

Health & Observability Enhancements

• Resource health plugins let teams surface custom readiness logic for CRDs (e.g., Linkerd, Istio, Knative) directly in the UI.
• New dashboard widgets visualize Kubernetes events, controller state, and revision history with filters per project.
• Webhook notifications to Slack, MS Teams, and PagerDuty relay sync completions, drift, and policy violations.

Progressive Delivery Controls

1. Sync Waves & Hooks: Declarative ordering combined with automated verification gates (jobs, webhooks, analysis runs).
2. Retry Policies: Configure exponential backoff and max attempts before human escalation.
3. Multi-Cluster Rollouts: Blueprint patterns promote changes from staging to production clusters using the same Git commit.

Getting Started

kubectl apply -n argocd -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/argoproj/argo-cd/v1.7.0/manifests/install.yaml
kubectl apply -n argocd -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/argoproj-labs/applicationset/v0.1.0/manifests/install.yaml

Create an ApplicationSet:

apiVersion: argoproj.io/v1alpha1
kind: ApplicationSet
metadata:
  name: tenant-apps
spec:
  generators:
  - clusters: {}
  template:
    metadata:
      name: '{{name}}-frontend'
    spec:
      source:
        repoURL: [email protected]:org/platform-config.git
        path: apps/frontend
        targetRevision: main
      destination:
        server: '{{server}}'
        namespace: frontend

Summary

Argo CD 1.7 gives platform teams the levers to manage hundreds of clusters from Git, complete with policy guardrails and real-time insights.