GitOpsify Everything: When Crossplane Meets Argo CD

The presentation discusses the use of GitOps and crossplane to manage both infrastructure and application deployment in a consistent manner across cloud-native and non-cloud-native systems.

• GitOps and Argo CD are used to manage application deployment templates and synchronize with GitHub repositories for deployment.
• Crossplane provides an abstraction platform for infrastructure provisioning, allowing for the management of both cloud-native and non-cloud-native systems.
• An Ansible provider is being developed to bridge the gap between cloud-native and non-cloud-native systems.
• The use of GitOps and crossplane allows for versioning and auditing of infrastructure and ensures that clusters map back to the defined state in GitHub.
• The infrastructure interface is a custom interface, which makes it difficult to adopt GitOps, but crossplane provides a solution to this problem.

The presentation describes how a pool of pre-provisioned Kubernetes clusters is maintained for deployment, and how the pool manager communicates with IBM's infrastructure provider to create new clusters when needed. Crossplane provides an abstraction platform for infrastructure provisioning, which simplifies the process for end-users who only need to specify the type and configuration of the cluster they require. The provider also provides the cluster endpoint and credentials, which are written to secrets on the control plane cluster. This allows for the continuous reconciliation of cluster state, ensuring that clusters map back to the defined state in GitHub.

Argo CD is a popular CNCF incubating project that implements GitOps on Kubernetes to drive continuous delivery of Cloud Native applications. Using Git at its core, it's been widely adopted across the industry. However, real-world organizations may still have many traditional IT systems, they may have invested heavily on management automation for these systems. How can they benefit from GitOps? This session will share the magic to combine Argo CD and existing non cloud native IT automation assets by crafting a bridge using Crossplane, another popular CNCF incubating project. It works seamlessly with existing automation technologies such as Ansible and Terraform, with a large user base and mature eco-systems. This empowers you to GitOpsify everything, cloud native or non cloud native, to manage hybrid technologies using GitOps consistently. The session will also share some best practices and lessons learned that you may consider when you start the GitOps transition with your IT systems.Click here to view captioning/translation in the MeetingPlay platform!