August 2025 Summaries

Kostis Kapelonis outlines 30 Argo CD and GitOps anti-patterns that can complicate deployments, reduce developer autonomy, and undermine declarative operations as organizations scale their Kubernetes practices. The central recommendation is to treat Git as the complete, auditable source of truth for application definitions, deployment configuration, and desired state, avoiding UI-, CLI-, API-, parameter-, or dynamically generated changes that are not committed to version control. The discussion emphasizes learning Helm and Kustomize independently before integrating them with Argo CD, keeping their values and overlays separate from Argo CD Application resources so developers can reproduce environments locally without Argo CD knowledge. It advocates ApplicationSets, cluster labels, and appropriately scoped repositories for scalable application and cluster management, while cautioning against misusing multi-source applications, Helm packaging for Application CRDs, target revisions, static Application versioning, and one-size-fits-all ApplicationSets. Additional guidance covers retaining auto-sync and self-healing to prevent configuration drift, using rendered-manifest previews in reviews, separating infrastructure from product workloads, understanding finalizers and resource ownership for safe migration and recovery, and relying on specialized tools such as Argo Rollouts for progressive delivery, Argo Workflows for complex orchestration, and database migration operators for schema changes. Overall, Argo CD is presented as a focused continuous reconciliation and deployment engine rather than a replacement for CI systems, developer portals, workflow engines, or the entire software development lifecycle.