What's New in OpenShift GitOps 1.21

GitOps is now the definitive standard for managing Kubernetes cluster configuration and applications. Red Hat continues to see the widespread adoption of the GitOps methodology across our portfolio as customers look for ways to increase efficiency in their operations and development teams.

Red Hat is pleased to announce that version 1.21 of OpenShift GitOps has been released, bringing with it some exciting new capabilities.

New in version 1.21

Argo CD Image Updater is GA

The Argo CD Image Updater is now Generally Available for use. The Argo CD Image Updater can monitor an image repository and automatically update the Argo CD Application to use the new image. How it updates the Application is dependent on the write-back method chosen, the image updater supports writing directly to the Application (default) or writing the changes in git. 

Argo CD CLI is GA

The Argo CD CLI is now generally available, users can now download the CLI from Red Hat rather than relying on the unsupported upstream version. Instructions on how to download the CLI are available. 

Argo CD Agent Hybrid Architecture (TP)

Previously it was not possible to deploy the Argo CD application-controller with the Argo CD Agent Control Plane as both would attempt to manage Application resources resulting in conflicts. This is now possible in OpenShift GitOps 1.21 as a Technical Preview feature, the goal of this feature is to enable incremental migration from a standalone Centralized Argo CD architecture to the Argo CD Agent architecture.

Additionally the previous limitation added complexity to managing the Control Plane cluster itself with the Argo CD instance. Previously to manage the Control Plane cluster itself when using the Argo CD Agent one had to either install a separate standalone Argo CD instance or an Agent in a different namespace than where the Control Plane resides.

Documentation on this new feature is available upstream.

Argo CD Web Terminal Operator Support

While it was possible to enable the Argo CD Web Terminal manually in past releases users can now enable it directly in the Operator using:

apiVersion: argoproj.io/v1beta1
kind: ArgoCD
metadata:
  name: argocd
spec:
 …
 webhookTerminalEnabled: true

Note that users must still enable the necessary Kubernetes permissions for the web terminal as per this release note.

Declarative Management of Webhook Secrets

Argo CD requires secrets for webhooks to be placed in the shared argocd-secrets Secret on the cluster which either required a manual process or using an additional solution like the External Secrets Operator to add the relevant webhook secrets to the shared secret.

In this release, standalone secrets can be created for webhooks and the GitOps Operator will automatically copy the secrets into the shared argocd-secrets Secret.

apiVersion: argoproj.io/v1beta1
kind: ArgoCD
metadata:
  name: argocd
spec:
 …
 webhookSecrets:
    github:
      webhookSecretRef:
        key: token
        name: github-secret

OpenShift Console Plugin for OpenShift GitOps is TP

The OpenShift Console Plugin for OpenShift GitOps enables viewing Argo CD resources (Applications, ApplicationSets, AppProjects and Rollouts) directly in the OpenShift Console. This feature has been promoted to Technical Preview from the previous Developer Review.

This release also includes new views in the plugin to show ApplicationSet resources including steps with Progressive Syncs:

Argo CD 3.4

This version upgrades Argo CD to 3.4 from 3.3 that was used in OpenShift GitOps 1.20. Some of the changes in Argo CD 3.4 to be aware of include:

• Additional filtering capabilities are now available in the Argo CD UI including filtering by annotation, additional operational status filtering and the ability to quickly clear filters via a Clear Filters button
• It is now possible to use Glob, i.e. /env/*.yaml,  patterns for valueFiles in Applications. This is useful when handling overrides whose names may not be known in advance.
• The new Argo CD Agent hybrid architecture added support for a new annotation to cluster secrets, argocd.argoproj.io/skip-reconcile. When this annotation is set to true the application-controller will not reconcile any Application which use this destination.
• The Argo CD CLI has a new command, argocd account session-token, which outputs the current session token. This token can then be used in automation and scripts which call the Argo CD API.

The upstream release blog for Argo CD 3.4 is available and changes to be aware of between 3.3 and 3.4 available in the upstream documentation.

Conclusion

OpenShift GitOps 1.21 is a significant update with many new features, to learn more about this update please review the official documentation and release notes.