The history of Argo

We’re coming up on the 9th anniversary of the Argo Project and this is a great time to celebrate the history and timeline of one of the most successful open source projects in the last decade - the Argo Project.

It all started back in August 2017 when a small company called Applatix, led by founder Pratik Wadher released what would later be called Argo Workflows with the vision of creating a new type of platform for developing and running applications with containers. Argo Workflows unlocked the ability to run a chain of containers on Kubernetes, leading to fantastic scalability built on Kubernetes primitives.

Intuit acquires Applatix and creates Argo CD

In January 2018, Intuit was building on Argo Workflows and saw it as a core technology to enable their business. They acquired Applatix and one month later launched Argo CD. The tool, originally named just Argo became Argo Workflows. The reason for creating Argo CD was to make it easier to get Argo Workflows deployed and in sync with Kubernetes. Because Kubernetes uses declarative configuration, the ideal way to store and modify manifests is with git. Argo CD simply bridges the gap between git and Kubernetes.

Argo Rollouts would launch the same year in November 2018 to simplify progressive delivery in a declarative world. Before Argo Rollouts, progressive delivery implementations almost all relied on complex scripts and novel logic for each deployment. With Kubernetes, handling progressive delivery was suddenly easy and Argo Rollouts could provide a standardized approach that was entirely Kubernetes native.

In July 2019, Argo CD matured enough to make version 1.0. The community responded with enthusiasm and the project started to grow.

Argo joins the CNCF and Octopus Deploy becomes the 1st Argo vendor

Intuit had now invested several years into developing the Argo Project. Along the way Blackrock donated Argo Events. With critical business functions now relying on both Argo Workflows and Argo CD, Pratik, who was still leading his original team from Applatix wanted to help the project grow beyond the bounds of a single company. This is when Octopus Deploy (then Codefresh) enters the picture. Working with Intuit to bring the Argo Project into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the same foundation that manages Kubernetes. In April 2020, the Argo Project, with each of its components (Argo Workflows, Argo CD, Argo Events, and Argo Rollouts), became an official CNCF sandbox project. Octopus Deploy became the 1st Argo vendor maintainer in July 2020 with RedHat joining just one month later.

Octopus Deploy then partnered with RedHat, Weaveworks, Microsoft, and others to launch the GitOps Working Group and establish the GitOps Principles. These principles would become the foundational document for exactly what GitOps means.

In 2021 the Argo Project goes mainstream

Powered up by corporate maintainers including Intuit, Octopus Deploy, BlackRock, and RedHat project velocity took off. Argo CD 2.0 dropped in April. Argo Rollouts went 1.0 one month later. In October, Octopus Deploy partnered with 80+ other companies to release the GitOps Principles v1.0.

The same month part of the original team who worked on Argo at Intuit left to start Akuity.

In December, under lockdowns Octopus Deploy, Intuit, and RedHat teamed up to put on the first ArgoCon. It’s a virtual event with nearly 4,000 attendees.

From here, things only accelerated. In 2022, Octopus Deploy launched the first GitOps Certification for Argo. It becomes the most successful Argo Training and Certification in the world with over 25k students worldwide. In 2024, Octopus Deploy acquired Codefresh bringing the team of Argo maintainers and the enterprise Argo platform into one organization.

After passing security audits, governance review, and numerous other criteria, the year ended with the Argo Project reaching graduation status in the CNCF.

Scaling with Argo today

Today, the Argo Project is alive and healthy with Octopus Deploy as the #1 maintainer for Argo CD and Pipekit leading on maintaining Argo Workflows. Intuit is still a key leader on the project along with Red Hat, Akuity, and BlackRock and of course a large portion of contributions coming directly from the community.

Octopus Deploy offers Enterprise Support for Argo CD, Argo Rollouts, and Argo Workflows, including consulting with Technical Account Management and provides a 1st class CD experience with Argo in Octopus Deploy. The Octopus Deploy platform allows Argo users to connect all their Argo instances into a single control plane to managing promoting and deploying applications across all clusters and environments while handling testing, operations, approvals, and an overall policy engine to help teams adopt more quickly and keep CD on track.