Innovative Thinking Introducing Argo Flux At Intuit, proud maker of TurboTax andQuickBooks, we believe that everyone deserves the opportunity to prosper. We’re dedicated to providing the tools, skills, and insights that empower people around the world to take control of their finances and live the lives they want. Nearly two years ago, Intuit acquired Applatix to accelerate Intuit’s cloud journey Written by Pratik Wadher Published Nov 14, 2019 - [Updated Mar 13, 2024] 3 min read At Intuit, proud maker of TurboTax andQuickBooks, we believe that everyone deserves the opportunity to prosper. We’re dedicated to providing the tools, skills, and insights that empower people around the world to take control of their finances and live the lives they want. Nearly two years ago, Intuit acquired Applatix to accelerate Intuit’s cloud journey by leveraging cloud native technologies to greatly increase development velocity. Applatix’s focus was to provide the essential building blocks based on containers and public cloud to enable enterprises to quickly and continuously develop and deploy software and services. It wasn’t easy. We were shepherding a new way of software development, changing the way developers create software and ship code. We knew there was a better way and so we set out to create Argo, a container-native workflow engine for Kubernetes, and open sourced it to the cloud native developer community. After the acquisition of Applatix by Intuit, we continued our mission, joined forces with fellow CNCF member BlackRock, and contributed to the cloud native community projects that started with solving the needs we internally had running large scale Kubernetes infrastructure. We wanted to share our learnings in advancing the mission of transforming software delivery in the cloud native landscape for the benefit of the broader community through projects like: Argo CD, declarative continuous deployment for Kubernetes, to support our massive multi-tenant Kubernetes based platform, we needed a GitOps based Continuous Delivery solution that can deploy applications in multiple clusters and support enterprise features such as single sign-on (SSO) and RBAC. Argo Events, an event-based dependency manager for Kubernetes to trigger workflows and applications. Argo Rollouts, As Intuit started managing 2000+ services across 160+ clusters as documented in this case study, we needed a solution to do blue-green and canary deployments and an experimentation platform that provided Progressive Delivery. In the meantime, Argo Workflows, got widely adopted by the machine learning and data processing communities as they were looking for a highly scalable, Kubernetes-native workflow orchestrator. Argo Workflows has been part of Kubeflow from v0.1. Two years later, it’s humbling to see Argo projects, collectively, have 6,000+ stars on Github, and gaining significant traction in the cloud native community with more than 60 enterprises publicly backing the project (Adobe, Alibaba Cloud, Google, Nvidia, SAP, Tesla, Ticketmaster, Volvo, and many more), and contributing to the projects. As a result of this widespread adoption and community participation, we have recently submitted Argo to be a part of the CNCF Incubation project. Today, I’m excited to share the we’ve teamed up with Weave Works and AWS to unify CNCF Flux, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation sandbox project, and Argo CD to announce Argo Flux, an open source GitOps continuous delivery tool that will bring the best of the two projects under one umbrella. This partnership unifies the two projects and, more importantly, the developer and user communities to offer a more comprehensive approach to continuous delivery using Kubernetes. As a result of joining forces to form a larger developer community, we hope to bring more innovation faster for the benefit of everyone in the cloud native community. As a first step in the unification of the projects, the Argo CD and CNCF Flux development communities are designing and implementing GitOps engine, which forms the substrate for the two projects while, in the short-term, preserving the existing user experience of the projects. The two communities will continue to work together to evolve the code base to provide a unified user experience. Please join Bob Wise, General Manager, EKS, Alexis Richardson, Founder & CEO, Weave Works, and me at the AWS Container Day for a keynote followed by a panel discussion Kubernetes and GitOps. You can see demos of the projects and interact with the maintainers working on the projects. I hope to see you there! Please also join us at the Intuit booth (S47) at the main KubeCon conference to learn more about Argo and interact with the maintainers of the projects. Previous Post Changing the Future of Technology, Together Next Post Intuit’s CTO on AI in 2020 & Beyond Written by Pratik Wadher Pratik Wadher is a senior vice president of product development at Intuit with responsibility for all development services and experiences, including the cloud-native modern SaaS platform that powers the company's financial products and services, which serve more than 100 million customers around the world. Before Intuit, Pratik was the co-founder and CEO of Applatix (acquired by Intuit) and Argo Project creator. Previously, Pratik led teams at multiple startups focusing on storage and distributed systems. Browse Related Articles Social Responsibility Intuit partners with The Farmlink Project to address climate change and combat food waste Life at Intuit How to become a better trans+ and non-binary ally Life at Intuit Here’s how women at Intuit inspire inclusion Taxpayer Empowerment Powering prosperity for women means addressing gender inequities in the tax code Job Readiness Powering prosperity, one community at a time Taxpayer Empowerment Setting the record straight on tax preparation Small Business Intuit acquires IP and hires talent from Proper Finance Canada Growing with Intuit Social Responsibility Intuit and Khan Academy team up to offer free financial education to students and teachers Innovative Thinking A new tool to make taxes more transparent