ArgoCD, 16,000 Apps, and a Trail of Questionable Decisions
Full length talk (20 minutes)
Abstract
In 2024, we moved to GitOps with ArgoCD. Production went smoothly; development… less so. Turns out managing 16,000 apps on a single cluster is a bit more than the maintainers likely imagined.
This talk walks through ArgoCD's scaling assumptions, how they hold up, where they break down, and the workarounds that kept things running. Some of those workarounds were good engineering. Some involved making implementation details load-bearing.
Speaker Bio
Andrew is a Senior Staff Platform Engineer at SafetyCulture in Sydney, where he owns GitOps, developer platforms, and the various Kubernetes controllers holding them together. He spends most of his work time on ArgoCD, custom operators, and the kind of platform infrastructure that becomes interesting when it stops working. Outside of work, he spends most of his free time reading, averaging over 50 books a year.