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Argo Rollouts: Powering Production-Ready Deployments with Confidence 🚀
Hey everyone, and welcome back to the blog! Today, we’re diving deep into the incredible world of Argo Rollouts, a project that’s rapidly becoming the go-to solution for sophisticated and production-ready application deployments. We’ve synthesized some fantastic insights from a recent Argo Con presentation, and trust us, you’re going to want to hear this!
The Growing Argo Rollouts Community 🤝
It’s always inspiring to see a project gain momentum, and Argo Rollouts is
definitely on that upward trajectory. Did you know that in 2025, the
users.md file, a testament to active adoption, saw 18 new users join the
Argo Rollouts community? Even more impressive? 67% of those new users
contributed code or bug fixes when they added themselves! This isn’t just a
random collection of users; these are individuals from some pretty big
companies you’re likely familiar with, showcasing the growing trust and
reliance on Argo Rollouts for critical deployments.
Real-World Impact: Scale and Stability at Intuate 🤯
Speaking of production readiness, the team at Intuate shared some mind-blowing statistics about their Argo Rollouts usage. This isn’t just about their specific setup, but a powerful demonstration of the scale that Argo Rollouts can manage:
- Massive Deployment Footprint: Intuate manages a staggering 24,000 rollout objects spread across 350 clusters.
- High Deployment Velocity: They perform approximately 116,000 deployments per month.
- Incident Prevention Powerhouse: Argo Rollouts boasts an
abortfeature that intelligently detects application problems. At Intuate, this feature has potentially saved over 100 incidents per month, acting as a crucial safety net in production!
These numbers speak volumes about the stability and resilience Argo Rollouts brings to complex, high-volume environments.
Argo Rollouts 1.9 RC1: A Milestone of Stability and Innovation ✨
The recent release of Argo Rollouts 1.9 RC1 is a significant step forward, focusing heavily on stabilization and bug fixes. But don’t let the “stabilization” label fool you; this release is packed with progress:
- Community Driven: A remarkable 69 total contributors were involved, with 55 being brand new to the project!
- Feature Rich: This release introduces 7 new features, alongside a substantial 47 bug fixes.
- Enhanced Documentation: 31 documentation updates ensure users have the resources they need.
- Under the Hood Improvements: 15 chore updates (general maintenance) were implemented, including a critical upgrade of Kubernetes client libraries.
Upgrading to the Latest Kubernetes Libraries 🛠️
A key “chore” that had a major impact was updating Argo Rollouts’ dependencies
to match the latest Kubernetes libraries. Kubernetes frequently introduces new
features in its podspec, and Argo Rollouts needs to keep pace to enable these.
Thanks to dedicated effort, the dependencies have been upgraded to 1.34.4, the
latest version, unlocking all the new podspec features for users. This was a
substantial undertaking, involving changes to 68 files and adding
approximately 4,700 lines of code!
Exciting New Features in Recent Releases 🎉
Beyond the core stability, several new features are making Argo Rollouts even more powerful and flexible:
Progress Thresholds: Smarter Deployment Progression 📈
Previously, Argo Rollouts was quite rigid, requiring 100% of pod availability metrics to be met before advancing to the next deployment step. This could lead to frustrating delays, especially in noisy environments or when using Horizontal Pod Autoscalers (HPAs).
- Introducing Tolerations: In versions 1.8.9 and later, you can now configure tolerations for these progress checks.
- Smoother Deployments: This allows for more flexibility, preventing your deployments from getting stuck waiting for perfect stabilization, and enabling smoother progress even with dynamic pod counts.
Analysis Model Refresh: Enhanced Observability 📊
A fantastic collaboration between Credit Karma and the open-source community has brought significant UI improvements to the analysis model.
- Visual Insights: You can now see graphs of your analysis runs directly in the UI.
- Deeper Understanding: Easily identify what metrics were configured, why an analysis failed, and where the failures occurred. This provides invaluable insight for debugging and optimizing your deployments.
Step Plugins: Unleash Custom Deployment Logic 🧩
A game-changer introduced in version 1.8 is the Step Plugins feature.
- Custom Deployment Steps: This allows you to define custom steps within your Argo Rollouts workflows.
- Endless Possibilities: Imagine enabling advanced strategies like multi-region routing, or integrating custom pre- or post-deployment checks. If you can design it, you can likely implement it as a plugin! There’s even a dedicated talk later today diving deeper into this powerful feature.
Argo Rollouts is clearly evolving at an incredible pace, driven by a vibrant community and a commitment to delivering robust, scalable, and intelligent deployment solutions. If you’re not already using it, now is the perfect time to explore how Argo Rollouts can transform your CI/CD pipeline!