https://youtu.be/uCkxbjowJiQ?t=2591 Presented at CNCF Eastern Canada online meetup, May 12 2020. Learn how BioBox reuses and shares knowledge between Ops and Dev teams with development environments running from ArgoCD. This "black frame, not a box" approach allows developers to get up and running quickly on a stack that matches the production environment. At the same time the "black frame" can be peeked into when developer's need to edit application templates, instead of waiting on Ops. Importantly, this method exposes developers to operations tooling (ELK and Grafana/Prometheus for dev!) and concepts (GitOps, branch-per-env) on a daily basis, at a pace they can feel comfortable with.

1. You Got GitOps In My
Development Environment!
Unifying Operations and Development with ArgoCD
Julian Mazzitelli, CIO BioBox Analytics Inc.
May 12, 2020

2. BioBox.io

3. 1. What is GitOps, how does ArgoCD work
2. Problem: disparity between development environment and production
environment
3. Solution: ArgoCD per developer
4. DX: Developer Experience
5. Effect on organizational structure: team topologies

4. GitOps
https://www.weave.works/blog/automate-kubernetes-with-gitops
https://www.weave.works/technologies/gitops/

5. How ArgoCD Performs the GitOps Loop
Template in git
- Helm
- Jsonnet
- Kustomize
- Plain yaml
- Custom
- etc.

6. How ArgoCD Performs the GitOps Loop
Application CRD
- source.repoURL
- source.path
- source.targetRevision
- source.<template-specific-params>

7. How ArgoCD Performs the GitOps Loop

8. How ArgoCD Performs the GitOps Loop

9. How ArgoCD Performs the GitOps Loop

10. How ArgoCD Performs the GitOps Loop

11. How ArgoCD Performs the GitOps Loop
“Deployments” repository to hold
Application CRDs, or use
separate folders within one
repository, or deployment repo
per app, or ...

12. Development Environment Options
Local machine,
un-containerized
Docker Compose
(current)
Kubernetes
(desired)
Docker images ❌ ✅ ✅
Prod-like
Networking
❌ ❌ / ~ (with effort) ✅
Prod-like
observability
❌ ❌ ✅
Prod resemblance ~40% ~60-70% ~90%
❌: not at all, or with lots of duplicated effort

13. Ops is doing it already, can Dev too?
- Operations team is already using Kubernetes to deploy application
- Operations team is already using ArgoCD
- => ArgoCD templates already exist for platform (API gateway, observability)
and application
- Want to reuse and share knowledge between Ops and Dev but..
- Kubernetes on its own (kubectl apply) is too complicated, lots of potential for error (drift!)
- Solution: Ops team prepares personal ArgoCD per developer
- Can use GitOps deployment repo, web UI, or kubectl to deploy stack
- Development environment is near exact copy of prod

14. Personal ArgoCD Architecture

15. Personal ArgoCD Architecture

16. Personal ArgoCD Architecture

17. Personal ArgoCD Architecture

18. Developer Perspective
1. Copy/paste app-ticket.application.yaml into personal deployments repo and
push, or use ArgoCD UI, or kubectl apply
2. Ksync (volume sync between local machine and pod) local checkout and
pods in stack as desired
a. See also Telepresence / Ambassador Edge Stack “service preview” (network proxies b/w local
and Pod)
3. Use kubectl logs (or ELK!) for reading logs, Grafana/Prometheus for metrics
a. Developers get practice using observability tooling on a day-to-day basis
4. If templates need to change, modify targetRevision of Application to point to a
feature branch on developer’s personal templates repo, make edits to
template, PR these back to upstream org templates when complete
5. Developer pulls in upstream master whenever PRs merged on organization
templates

19. A Black Frame, Not a Box
- ArgoCD is a black box that can be “peeked into”
- If developer does need to edit templates, they can do so autonomously (or
with help of Ops) as opposed to waiting on a ticket
- Slowly introduce some ops concepts to developer at a pace they can feel
comfortable with
- BioBox uses custom JavaScript (language our devs are familiar with)
templates (instead of Helm/Jsonnet etc) to further lower the barrier to entry

20. - Expose developer to templates (YAML, helm, kustomize, jsonnet, etc.) for
application as well as platform configuration
- Easy to set up, but not a black box and they can inspect further as they feel
comfortable
- Aiming for somewhere in between Type 1 and Type 2 team topology:
https://web.devopstopologies.com/

21. BioBox is hiring! Email julian@biobox.io