We are excited to announce plans for a new major release for Argo CD!
Over the past few years we have noticed the adoption of a number of anti patterns, performance limitations and ease of use limitations that could not be addressed with a simple minor release. We see opportunities for better performance and ease of use by only deprecating those configurations, setting smarter defaults and encouraging more best practices.
Argo CD 3.0 sets the stage for us to bring the next generation of features along with performance and scalability improvements the community hungers for.
This release will improve UX, security and performance by:
- Introducing additional recommended configurations out of the box, thus reducing required effort to achieve more secure and performant Argo CD configurations
- Dropping support for legacy configuration options, that we discourage using
With time and community feedback, we realized that certain optional configurations should in fact be the default, since many users explicitly configure those. One such example would be some performance-related configurations.
This release will also address long-existing technical debt, caused by supporting legacy configurations we started with when Argo CD was young, and which we no longer recommend on using, as Argo CD had matured.
What Is Changing in This Version?
Here is a non-exhaustive list of changes in this release, among those:
- Removal of support for legacy argocd-cm repository config
- Enabling fine-grained update/delete RBAC enforcement by default
- Making applyNestedSelectors: true the default and only option for matrix/merge generators
- Having an opinion on secrets — while we remained un-opinionated regarding secret management with Argo CD since day 1, maintainability and security lessons learned surfaced the need to be better aligned with the industry in this domain
- Preventing the usage of in-cluster, when in-cluster is explicitly disabled
Backwards Compatibility & Migration
We aim for v3 release to be so inoffensive, that upgrading to 3.0 is almost as easy as upgrading between 2.x minor versions has been.
For each change, the documentation will contain clear description of:
- What the change is
- How to determine whether the user is affected by the change (i.e which command to run)
- How to migrate
- For relatively high-risk changes - how to opt out (i.e switch back to the old default)
Get Involved
You can read the full proposal here. Please give us your feedback!
If there are additional breaking changes you are aware of, that are aligned with the 3.0 proposed concepts, and can further improve Argo CD configuration, please open an issue for those.
We look forward to continuing the conversation with the Argo CD community.
Call for Contributions
We have labeled some issues planned for v3, which we would love to get contributions for (and this is a breathing list!), here.
This is your opportunity to become an active part of this release!
Support for Older Versions
At the release date of v3 GA, the following versions will be supported: v2.14 and v2.13, as per the regular support policy for minor versions.
Planned Release Dates
The v3 RC is currently planned for Mar. 17, 2025 and v3 GA for May 6, 2025.
<hr /><p>Announcing Argo CD v3: Small But Mighty was originally published in Argo Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.</p>