KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2025 | Regina Voloshin, Octopus Deploy & Michael Crenshaw, Intuit

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Regina Voloshin

Argo CD Maintainer and 3.0 Release Champion

Octopus Deploy

Michael Crenshaw

Argo CD Project Lead and Maintainer, 3.0 Contributor

Intuit

play_circle_outline Collaboration with community: gathering feedback, incorporating best practices, and community contributions

play_circle_outline Leveraging Kubernetes ecosystem: Argo CD works best when utilizing Kubernetes capabilities

play_circle_outline Attracting contributors: being responsive in CNCF Slack, encouraging community involvement and contributions.

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Regina Voloshin, Octopus Deploy & Michael Crenshaw, Intuit

Regina Voloshin

Argo CD Maintainer and 3.0 Release Champion Octopus Deploy

Michael Crenshaw

Argo CD Project Lead and Maintainer, 3.0 Contributor Intuit

In this enlightening session from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2025, Michael Crenshaw of Intuit and Regina Voloshin of Octopus Deploy share insights on the evolving landscape of GitOps. Presented by theCUBE Research and hosted by Savannah Peterson and Rob Strechay, this discussion explores the latest innovations and community-driven enhancements in Argo CD 3.0.

Crenshaw brings years of expertise in software deployments, focusing particularly on how GitOps streamlines operations and enhances security. Voloshin, a leading figure from Octopus Deploy, off... Read more

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon and welcome back to CloudCon KubeCon here in London, England. My name is Savannah Peterson. Delighted to be streaming to you three days of coverage on theCUBE, joined with Rob Strechay here. Rob, there are so many cool projects, so many cool conversations, and so many cool people that we've already had on the show.

Rob Strechay

>> I think this has been such a fun time already. Again, we talk about the community, and I think it really comes together with the different projects that we get to explore over the course of the week. I think, again, a big piece of what's going on is GitOps and really how people-

Savannah Peterson

>> Absolutely....

Rob Strechay

>> do things in a more orderly manner so that you don't have outages like we've seen over the last summer when things... maybe missed canaries or something like that. I'll park that one for another day, though.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes, but speaking of cool projects, I'm very excited for our next conversation. Reggie Voloshin and Michael Crenshaw, thank you so much for taking the time to hang out with us today.

Michael Crenshaw

>> Thank you for having us.

Regina Voloshin

>> Thank you for hosting us.

Savannah Peterson

>> How is your KubeCon going so far?

Michael Crenshaw

>> Oh, fantastic.

Savannah Peterson

>> This has got to be really fun show for you, I would imagine.

Michael Crenshaw

>> Yes. Well, London is beautiful. We had ArgoCon yesterday and had a lot of fun. I gave three different talks there. They're super good attendance, super good conversations with everybody, so having a lot of fun.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's great. What did y'all talk about yesterday?

Michael Crenshaw

>> I personally did the project update for Argo CD and just filled people in on how things are going, and then I did a talk about environment promotion in GitOps.

Savannah Peterson

>> Cool. You were busy yesterday.

Michael Crenshaw

>> Yeah. A little bit.

Savannah Peterson

>> What were you up to yesterday, Reggie?

Regina Voloshin

>> Well, yesterday I was giving a session about securing Argo CD in multi-tenant environments.

Rob Strechay

>> Wow.

Savannah Peterson

>> I bet a lot of people were curious to learn about that.

Regina Voloshin

>> Yes. I think it was good feedback about that.

Savannah Peterson

>> Loving it.

Rob Strechay

>> What's the update? Help us understand, 3.0 is out or coming or somewhere in between or something? Where are we at?

Michael Crenshaw

>> The big news is Argo CD 3.0 is coming. We have a release candidate out and we've got about a month and a half until it goes general availability. It's got a lot of improvements to performance and security. We've also done a lot of work standardizing on some of the best practices that the community has revolved to. So 3.0 is on its way and we hope people give it a test early and let us know if they find any issues so we can work on them.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love that. There's a lot going on. We talked about the community. This is a celebration of community. Talk to me a bit about the process. I can imagine you get a lot of community feedback, especially being on your team, so how do you know what those best practices are going to be? It feels like a tough challenge.

Regina Voloshin

>> Yeah. Actually, this release is really a celebration of collaboration with the community, just like you said. We have gathered feedback from the community using blog posts, and then those blog posts linked to GitHub issues, on which we wanted the users to provide feedback on. WE actually saw that people were reacting and it was very exciting. We also were posting questions on the Slack CNCF channel with requests for more feedback. And then, with this invaluable feedback that the community provided, we were able to take those best practices and those great lessons that the community has and we were able to pack it into Argo CD v3 so that they're now available for all the users to take advantage of.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's awesome. Yeah, go ahead.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. I went and read up a little bit before this, just so I'm not totally unaware of what's coming in the release candidate and then hopefully in GA. One of the things that I was struck by, well, I was struck by a couple of things, but really the upgradability. That to me makes a lot of sense because a lot of people I think in Salt Lake were talking about... that was a big topic in Salt Lake. Help us understand how-

Savannah Peterson

>> ....

Rob Strechay

>> the upgradability came about and what it means now going forward from 2.0 to 3.0 and beyond.

Michael Crenshaw

>> It was very important to us when we started designing the 3.0 release that it is almost as easy to upgrade to 3.0 as it was to upgrade from 2.9 to 2.10, et cetera. I think we hit a good balance there. We took some features that were really old and weren't really used anymore and we were able to remove those, and it should be reasonably safe, and we picked mostly some performance improvements that we've tested really well and are performing well and switched those on by default. There will be some folks who happen to be using super old configuration or rely on the behavior of old performance features and they may struggle a bit more with 3.0, but for the most part it should be a nice easy drop-in replacement and upgrade.

Rob Strechay

>> Just to follow up on that-

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, go for it. ...

Rob Strechay

>> because I think you hit on something that is always interesting with open source is the old configurations. Do you survey the users and get a better understanding of the distribution of which versions they're on? Because if you're doing a-

Michael Crenshaw

>> Great question....

Rob Strechay

>> commercial product, you can figure that out through telemetry and stuff like that.

Michael Crenshaw

>> We do run surveys. We've got a survey this year, so folks can let us know what features they use. We are very active in GitHub issues and CNCF Slack. We get a pretty good feeling for what people are actively using just because they ask questions about it, if things break and they're like, "Hey, we need help." There are some features that are so old and have had good replacements for so long that we can be super confident that we're good to move on, but there are others that we just stay tuned into the community.

Savannah Peterson

>> That was a great question, Rob. There's a lot of people navigating their Kubernetes journey still, lots of folks just getting onboarded, and everybody needs advice for doing things right. I see that there's a lot of recommendations and documentation that y'all are doing as well as a part of this. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Regina Voloshin

>> Yes. Actually, one of the big things, a big new recommendation that we have for Argo CD v3 is actually that we're now opinionated about how we manage secrets when using GitOps. Before now, we were not opinionated about this. Basically, there are two alternatives of doing that. One alternative is using Kubernetes operators, like External Secrets Operator or Sealed Secrets Operator. The other way of populating secrets would be using automatic processes or plugins that plugin into Argo CD and then populate the secrets during the phase at which Argo CD is generating the manifest. As the years came by and as we have seen what's going on in the industry, we actually now have a clear opinion and a clear statement on what we recommend the users to do. We recommend sticking to those Kubernetes operators because this would actually make the secret management with GitOps more reliable, more secure, and also more scalable, and it will drastically reduce the needed configuration compared to the other alternative of using plugins.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, go for it.

Rob Strechay

>> Do you see that, and because security is such a big piece of all of this, and we were talking earlier with another guest and my whole thing was that it's collaboration between developers and platform engineering and security and it's almost a meet in the middle. You guys are in the middle of that. Do you get a lot of requests to help ease the... Because just knowing the developers I had on my teams at different companies, they hated the word shift-left, because it was shifting and it was more like, no, make me do more on the left from a security perspective, and they wanted to just ease that. Is that a lot of what you're seeing and trying to help be the glue between those sides?

Michael Crenshaw

>> I can speak from my experience at Intuit. Yes, Argo, we sit in the middle. We're where a lot of the action happens. Deployments, obviously. So there are regularly requests from developers for, "This is difficult for me. I think that Argo CD can help me do this better." Platform engineers will come in and try to help build those capabilities. I think that Argo CD is strongest when we lean into Kubernetes and its capabilities. At Intuit, folks ask me for Argo CD API access. They want to be able to modify manifests, run actions, et cetera, and sometimes that makes sense. A lot of the time, it makes more sense for the platform to build an aggregate API or a controller and then expose that contract to the users from their team's perspective, which is usually more focused than just the team that's doing Argo CD. By building that contract and that capability in Kubernetes, they necessarily make it available through Argo CD. So we sit in the middle. We work best, though, when we just do what Kubernetes does best.

Savannah Peterson

>> Why is that? Why do you work best when you're leveraging Kubernetes that way?

Michael Crenshaw

>> Because Kubernetes is just so good at being robust. It has an incredible API, an incredible ecosystem around security controls. It's got very well-established RBAC. It has a good model for associating roles, role bindings to service accounts, and tons of information and discussion among experts in the security community, API communities, et cetera. It's just such a robust space that Argo CD works best when we take advantage of what already exists. Things like Argo CD config management, plugins like actions, those are fantastic features, but it is limited within the Argo CD ecosystem. Kubernetes is just a much broader ecosystem where we can take advantage of a lot of capabilities.

Savannah Peterson

>> You talk about robust, and I'm just thinking about how robust this audience is here, too. You know what I mean? This is a room of all of the people who contribute and build and are a part of this platform. So fun to watch it mature. How many KubeCons have you guys been to?

Regina Voloshin

>> This is actually just my second one.

Savannah Peterson

>> No way, Reggie.

Regina Voloshin

>> Okay, this is my second one physically and I have attended one virtually.

Savannah Peterson

>> Man, I'm impressed. I would've assumed you've been around a lot more than that. What about for you, Michael?

Michael Crenshaw

>> I think fourth or fifth.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh, yeah.

Michael Crenshaw

>> I'm starting to have trouble keeping count.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's fair. I think I'm on five, six. How many have you been to?

Rob Strechay

>> I think seven, but...

Michael Crenshaw

>> Oh.

Savannah Peterson

>> You would, Rob.

Rob Strechay

>> I went to one before I was here with theCUBE. I think to your point on the community, how have you enticed people to get involved, to get involved in the Argo-

Savannah Peterson

>> Ooh, yeah, great question.

Rob Strechay

>> Because I look at it as, if I'm platform engineering, maybe I'm not a dev in platform engineering because platform engineering a lot of times is the new word for IT, and what people... We were talking about you're not going to find storage admins anymore, network admins. There's platform engineers that may have come up. Maybe they do some Python and stuff like that. How do you entice people to get involved?

Regina Voloshin

>> I think that maybe I can give-

Savannah Peterson

>> It's a great question. ...

Regina Voloshin

>> my personal example-

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> Please. ...

Regina Voloshin

>> with this. I was an Argo CD end user, and at some point in time we have received security requirements for something that didn't exist in Argo CD, and we were told in our organizations that we're not going to be able to use Argo CD in production until this security requirement is implemented. And then we started thinking about different workarounds on how to achieve that, and then I just looked at the workarounds and I said, "Okay, I think I'm just going to try and contribute that feature to Argo CD," and this is how this journey has started for me. I also believe that it may represent in a way also the journey of other people that are starting as contributors. I think that if we're talking about how end users are starting to get involved, then I just think that today, Argo CD, it's just very much standard, de facto of how you perform software delivery to Kubernetes in a CD way. So I believe the community is growing and contributions are growing, and I think it's self-enforcing in a way.

Savannah Peterson

>> Absolutely. You're basically saying because it's great, it attracts great people, which makes a lot of sense.

Regina Voloshin

>> Yes. Yes.

Savannah Peterson

>> What about you? Do you have any secret recruitment tactics we should know about?

Michael Crenshaw

>> Well, from my perspective, I try to be very responsive in CNCF Slack. That's where folks often come to say, "I'm already working on a feature," or "This is a feature I'd like to work on." They say, "Oh, I'm having trouble setting up my dev environment." And that's where it starts. Just being responsive to people when they encounter issues is hugely beneficial, and that's paid off amazingly with Reggie when she was first working on the security feature. We worked together to get past some initial issues. It's a really awesome full circle moment now because the feature that she built is now default in Argo CD 3.0, which is a release that she helps lead.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's awesome. I love that. That is such a great ecosystem story in the sense that now you've helped build the de facto when it was your de facto. It's beautiful. I love that. All right, I have one final question for you two. Since now you're going to continue going to KubeCons, Reggie, you're on the hook, we like you having you on the show too much, what do both of you hope to be able to say next year when we're in Amsterdam at KubeCon this time next year that you can't yet say today?

Michael Crenshaw

>> Sure.

Savannah Peterson

>> You're in the hot seat next to me, Michael.

Michael Crenshaw

>> Okay. Next year at Amsterdam, I want to be able to say that we've established a strong pattern for environment promotion in the GitOps ecosystem. GitOps has always been at odds with environment promotion because the strong connection between Git and the cluster is at odds with time, and the idea of injecting time between promotions, I'm working on a tool called GitOps Promoter with the folks at Intuit, and hopefully by next year we'll be able to say, "This is robust and this is the solution."

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, we look forward to talking about that. What about you, Reggie?

Regina Voloshin

>> Well, I think that next year I want to be able to say that we're able to address the PRs, the pull requests from the community, in a much more quicker way so that we can increase the amount of contributions that are actually making it into Argo CD. Really, we'll be excited to take part in that.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, we will definitely have you both back on to talk about that in Amsterdam, or whatever KubeCon we might find ourselves. Reggie, Michael, thank you so much for taking the time on such a busy week for y'all, and thank you, Rob, as always. And thank you, wherever you might be tuning in. We're here in London, England at KubeCon CloudNativeCon. My name's Savannah Peterson, you're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.