 Good morning, Argo Khan. That was a little lame, so let's one more time. Good morning, Argo Khan. How many folks were at the workshops yesterday? Everyone? That's incredible. It was great to meet you yesterday. If for some reason I haven't met you yet, please come see me. I'll be at the Intuit booth later today. So thank you for joining us. Can you believe that we're in a room together? Considering last year it was all virtual, this is really exciting. We have an incredible day planned for everyone here. We have some excellent talks, of course, all about Argo. So whether you're new to Argo or maybe you're currently using Argo, we hope that you'll leave inspired today. We hope you get a chance to connect with others and know that the person sitting next to you on your left and right is just as passionate about Argo as you are. Today you'll get a chance to interact with project maintainers. You'll learn from other practitioners and hopefully walk away with some best practices on how to adopt, enable, and scale Argo. So a huge thank you to all of our sponsors that make this possible, especially our diamond sponsors. Lead this out, yeah, thank you. Adobe, Acuity, CodeFresh, Parnas, Intuit, Red Hat, thank you. And of course, our Platinum sponsors. Yeah, sure, give them a cheer too. Nethopper.io, Opsmix Platform 9, thank you. And of course, a special thank you to the program committee who reviewed all the incredible abstracts and submissions and helped put together the content today. Thank you program committee. Okay, little housekeeping. So one, you should know we are in a very cool spot. Who has been to the Computer History Museum before? Way less hands than those attended the workshops. Good, because tonight you'll have full access. So walk around, check it out, get into the history, it's very cool. And also very important, know that there is an event, Code of Conduct. In short, everyone should feel welcome, included. You treat everyone with respect, professionalism. You're here, so you've already checked the box to abide by that Code of Conduct. Thank you very much. And know that all those great sponsors that we thanked earlier will be in the showcase. So stop by, learn more, I saw some swag. I know there's plushies floating around, limited edition, so get on that. Okay, enough talking from me. I'm very excited to introduce our first keynote speaker, the executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, please welcome to the stage with major energy, Priyanka Sharma. Everybody, excited to be here. Welcome to ArgoCon, we've established we're at ArgoCon. Does everyone know they're at ArgoCon? It's such a cool energy over here. I'm so thrilled to see it. For those who don't know much about me, I am the executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which is the home for the Argo projects. So we are the home for the Argo projects, but generally, what really is CNCF? How many folks here are familiar with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation? Oh, awesome, that's great. So I can just skip the slide. You know that we are the home, vendor-neutral home for many of the most critical and fastest-growing open source projects, such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envy, and of course, the Argo quadruplets. With all the technologies that are in CNCF, we have 800-plus members that support the foundation. And they do this because they believe in our mission, they want to support the rise of Cloud Native. And you see some examples of companies here. Many of you work for folks on this logo wall. Intuit, for example, is such a great partner. We do so much with them, led by Pratik and his team. So all these folks, and many more in this ecosystem, believe in our mission at CNCF, which is making Cloud Native ubiquitous. So it's kind of funny, right? You're like, we're the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. We're making Cloud Native ubiquitous. It's kind of tautological, like we're dancing around the question, what is Cloud Native? Well, we actually are not dancing around the question. Just need maybe better marketing, but we do provide a specific definition of what is Cloud Native. Many of you may have read this, but the idea where it all came together was empowering organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern dynamic environments, such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs exemplify this approach. These techniques enable loosely coupled systems that are resilient, manageable, and observable. Combined with robust automation, they allow engineers to make high impact changes frequently and predictably with minimum toil. You may wonder why I read this whole thing out. It will make sense as I go through the presentation. You'll see. So this whole journey with what is Cloud Native, how do we define ourselves, started from the CNCF perspective in 2015, when Google donated Kubernetes to begin this new foundation. That was project number one. Kubernetes itself was part of a long history. I mean, just as recent as 2000s, we were on non-virtualized hardware. Then VMware and VMs became a thing. Then it came infrastructure as a service. AWS really put it out there for everyone, even though it existed a little before. Paz with Heroku over time, keep developing, and then Docker really made containers mainstream. Kubernetes, as you know, really sprung to fame because it did such a good job of helping dynamically orchestrate workloads for best resource utilization. That was the beginning. Today, CNCF has 145 projects. In a couple of months, this number will be different because we have regular reviews of projects trying to come in. We have over 169,000 contributors representing 187 countries. By the way, if you check how many countries are in their world, depends on who you ask really, but it's either 193 or 195. So we're pretty close to maximum coverage. So these projects that we just mentioned, they're in categories, the graduated projects, incubating projects, and sandbox. Argo projects are in the incubating category, which means they're very solid technologies, have a great community behind them, and they're really building up to get to that mass adoption stage which comes when you are at the graduated level. So there's lots of projects, lots of contributors. That's all great news. But I think even more interesting to me particularly is the velocity. When you look at it, just a year ago, it was only 114 projects, only 137,000 contributors. The country number has not changed much. So as I said, we're soon hitting the maximum limit, so I'm not feeling too terribly about that. Why is this happening? Well, because so many diverse people are involved at this point. Independent research tells us that 7.1 million folks are cloud-native developers, and that includes all of you in this room. And that huge community and ecosystem is part of the story of Argo's momentum, which truly exemplifies end user-driven open source. So remember I was talking about the definition and said I swear this makes sense later. This is because here I wanna highlight to you how the Argo projects are truly part of the cloud-native story and definition. When you're trying to build scalable applications, thinking of modern dynamic environments, the CD story is critical. The immutable infrastructure, again, about CD. Argo projects themselves have declarative APIs, help the developers use them easily. Projects are resilient, manageable, and observable. You all know this. With the get-off story, you're providing the robust automation folks need to make high impact changes frequently and predictively. The Argo story is tightly knit with the cloud-native journey people need to take. You are all contributing to helping the world build modern software successfully. The beginning was impressive from the start. April 7, 2020, the Technical Oversight Committee of CNCF welcomed Argo into the CNCF Incurator. And this was at a point where you had multi-vendor, multiple end user developers contributing. Since in those two years though, look at this. Argo is the number three highest velocity project in CNCF. This deserves a round of applause. When I talk about velocity, it's a combination number of number of PRs and issues, commits, and authors. So combine those three and you get the top three. Number one is Kubernetes, which started so long ago and joined in 2015. Number two is Hotel OpenTelemetry. Technically joined 2019, but I was working in OpenTracing in 2015, so it's like, what was the true real beginning anyway? And then you have Argo, which came recently and burst into the scene. This is really something to be proud of. This slide deck here, it links to the velocity report that we generate. You can look at it at any time to see where all the projects are at. Anywho, and if you look at your development velocity, it's up and to the right, just the way I like my graphs. The CNCF, the growth you had, violent CNCF is nothing short of impressive. 300% plus increase in contributions, 24% plus increase in companies. 579 companies have put in documentation commits. You've close to 9,000 contributors today. And just so you know, when you started, you had about, in CNCF, there were about 450 contributors. There were 425 companies to the 2,374 now. So it's not just high numbers percentage-wise, it's just high numbers period. So many companies, Intuit, CodeFresh, BlackRock, Acuity, Commonwealth Computer Research, who I just found out about, SwissPost, Alibaba, all kinds of diverse people are part of this journey. And that shows when you look at the contributor map. So many people around the world. By the way, I checked. There is like one or two people in Angola who are doing all these contributions from that country. Someone should go hire them. The CNCF-ARGO partnership is part of this beautiful journey and success story. What makes ARGO tick? Well, first of all, the technology. You have an awesome set of projects that provide folks a choice for GitOps as a part of a trusted ecosystem. You're relevant right now and you're really good. The diversity that you have of both end users and vendors behind the project gives you strength that is unparalleled. And finally, you folks work hard. You work with CNCF to utilize benefits, put the word out there and just do everything possible to help ARGO reach new heights. You'll hear from Pratik soon. He's just gonna tell you some really cool things which blew my mind. It's all about the effort. And there's so many things we work with CNCF-ARGO on. We provide the platform and the team to support for exposure. We do online programs, content creation, research, all kinds of things. I don't have time to go into the link that I have under Prolific, but if you click on it, you see almost every week. No, definitely every week. There is some cool effort. Someone did an online program, a webinar, a report that ARGO is doing. The media loves ARGO. There's 520 articles this year alone. The case studies are for everyone to look at. They are detailed and actually show impact. 88% meantime to resolution improvement is nothing to be sneezed at. But it's not just marketing. We work together to improve the project and be safety first. So ARGO took advantage of the relationship CNCF has with the AUSTIV, or the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund, and we did a security audit. We identified 26 issues in different projects of ARGO and everything is being worked on. Some as CVEs, some as non-CVEs, but the effort is on because security first. CNCF and ARGO are deep collaborators. Every month, a quarter, our collaboration takes new shape. Pratik and Hendrik from Intuit, for example, collaborate with us on this thing called the CTO Summit, which is a research event for end users to support everyone in their cloud-native journey. That's just one example of all the cool things that are happening. This event is another example of coming together, working hard to deliver the best for the ARGO community. This is ARGO and this is CNCF. Together, we are unstoppable. And now, I would like to invite Pratik Wader from Intuit to speak about ARGO. Please welcome Pratik. Well, good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening as well, because we are from everywhere. I know you're all here, but I was told there's actually quite a few people online and virtual. So welcome. Thank you, Priyanka, for that wonderful introduction to ARGO and our journey, by the way. This is an amazing journey. I was actually feeling pretty humbled as I walked through today and I saw all these big banners and never in my life would have imagined this project that we started five years ago would be where we are today. And it's a testament to all of you. To all of you that actually contribute on a daily basis, whether it's on the project, whether it's in the companies that you work for, whether it's improving the lives of the developers that you work for, it's amazing to see all of this. And before I start, I want to wish ARGO a very, very happy birthday. It's actually, so I mentioned, but it is five years. So Priyanka mentioned 2020 is when we actually incubated ARGO within the CNCF. The ARGO journey actually started in 2017. I distinctly remember talking about ARGO at a KubeCon. So it's a KubeCon 2017. On the way back, Mukulika sitting right here, we were all pumped about rolling out ARGO. We actually had our first user. We had someone from NVIDIA of all the companies. We met someone. And they were texting us on the plane and at the airport about using ARGO. So imagine that journey when we started and where we are today. It's a very important milestone. And again, having been part of this journey since the inception, I'm just always humbled and proud of what this community achieves on a daily basis. So again, thank you very much to all of you. This is gonna be an exciting day. I was actually very, very happy to see some of you at the workshop yesterday. So I hope you actually had a great time. And I look forward to talking with all of you today. So this is ARGOCon. This is actually our second official ARGOCon. We had our first virtual ARGOCon last year. We were very surprised at the number of people that showed up. And it continues, our journey continues. Today, I'm actually very happy and thankful that ARGOCon actually comes under the CNCF's wings. So you may have seen CNCF is actually hosting, participating and driving. And supporting this community. So again, thank you a lot to the CNCF community. Please, a lot of applause. Now, Priyanka shared some incredible growth of the cloud native journey and ARGO. It's very clear that ARGO as a community is thriving within the CNCF and the community that forms it. And we're all rallying to actually invest and make it grow. The main things that I want to focus on, though, is our growth. So last year, I actually showed this picture, it doesn't include all the companies. By the way, the way we track this, in case you don't know, is, I don't just come up with these names, but we do have in our Git repo, a way for any company to actually formally associate themselves with the ARGO project. And that's how we track it. So these are referenceable names that are actually in the Git repo of companies that are using ARGO. These are just some of the names, but in 2021, we had about 200 companies in that list. Well, guess what? We're in 2022, we have 380 companies. And these are official public references. It's almost double since we started. And as you can see, it's everywhere. I look at all these companies, and it's amazing to see all of you, and it's all of you, actually, by the way, that make it useful. I call it, this is our widening, our orbit of Argonauts everywhere. Love to see this, and love to see more of it. By the way, look at this. This is since December of last year. At ARGO, on 2021, we had about 17,000 stars. Today, we have over 25,000. For those of you that don't care about stars, I do care about stars. That's a way of keeping score. But if you look at the number of contributors, on average, we are adding six new contributors every day. Our community has grown by 2,000 people in a mere nine months. It's amazing and foundational growth of the platform. And all of this growth and success, it wouldn't be possible if we weren't able to delight our users. I mentioned this yesterday that when we created ARGO, the whole notion of ARGO is not just an open source project, it's a product. We need to think of ARGO as a product, and all of you, as your contributors and users, you need to think of it as a product. We need to design it and build it as a product. And one of the things we do that, just like any other product-based company does, is we measure NPS. And we do that through our yearly survey to look at what our users are saying, what they're like, what they don't like, and how do we improve the product. Now, for those of you who don't know about NPS scores, that 72 is an awesome NPS score for ARGO CD and an impressive score for ARGO workflows. So again, a huge round of applause for all of you for that. And we can see the growth, we can see the explosive growth in the number of contributors. I personally love that. I love to see that sea of blue, which was into it when we started, and a platix when we started, going down. This is fundamental to the success of an open-source project. It means the community is growing, the community continues to invest in the project, and it's not just one company driving it. All of you, this diversification that I see of the contributors that are coming in is very important. And all of you should feel very proud because you are critical to the success of ARGO. And we continue to grow. So as I said, we have a lot of maintainers. Look at the new ones. Please congratulate me on welcoming the new maintainers. Same goes for approvers. That list is growing. And our leaves. I'm excited about seeing this. This is the growth of not just the community, but people that actually contribute and lead this project. So please, again, continue doing what you're doing and make it successful. Now, where do we go from here? We've talked about ARGO CD. We've talked about ARGO workflows, events, rollouts. It's been amazing to see that journey. And as we start looking forward for the project, there are a number of areas that I begin to look at. So as Priyanka talked about, at CubeCon EU, we actually brought in a number of influential leaders, technology leaders from all sorts of companies to talk about the next set of challenges that they are facing in their companies and their environments. Three major themes started popping up as we started talking to these folks. The first one was security. Security is paramount as these tools like ARGO are used across the ecosystem of developers in a company. So making sure that the products are secure to use and available internally or externally over the cloud is important. Now, we have set ourselves a very high bar. By the way, I come from into it. As you know, security is paramount. We actually store over 70 million customers, personal data, taxes, businesses. So security is extremely important for us. And this is something that we have been focused on from day one. But it was still gratifying to see the partnership that we did to actually make ARGO even more robust and solid. Operational excellence is another one, right? As I talked to a lot of leaders across the spectrum, what they told me is like, hey, it was very easy to start using ARGO. It was very easy to start using Kubernetes. But as we scaled and as we grew, how do you manage these environments? How do you make it easier for our users to actually use this without learning all the intricacies of cloud native? And we've made it very simple. Kubernetes is extremely simple. But I know I face it first-hand when I have, I support over 7,000 developers that into it. And when you have a front-end developer that has to think about pod disruption budgets and PDBs and namespaces, great. We need to make it even more simpler. So the last one is around development velocity. And again, we talk about velocity. So we need to figure out how to enable every developer to move at speed in an organization. What we focus on is we need to be smarter platforms, make the experience extremely simple. And there are two themes that I'm going to highlight here today, and you're going to hear about it in the set of speakers that come next today. But using AI and ML, and that's a very widely used term in the industry today, everyone that I know of is doing something with AI and ML. What you're going to hear today is the journey that some of the companies here are embarking on and some have actually gone a lot further about actually employing these technologies in areas where it matters. So for example, when you start thinking about operational excellence and you start thinking about what developers worry about, what's the mean time to detect when something's going wrong, what's the mean time to restore when something has gone wrong. How do you find these things very quickly is an important thing. We talk about observability. Well, observability in its natural form consists of logging and monitoring and tracing. Well, guess what? When you start employing AI and you actually have models that can actually do anomaly detection, then you actually bring a whole new environment and dimension to operational excellence. And that's what this area is going to focus on for us. And Argo actually stands at the threshold of making it very easy for companies and for our users to adopt this. The second area is around application abstraction. I talked about making it easy for developers. Developers at any stage of development, whether it's a front-end developer, whether it's a mid-middle-layer developer or someone that's walking on the back end or someone that's actually developing and supporting the actual infrastructure. Not everyone needs to understand all the intricacies of Kubernetes or Argo. So one of the things we need to really start thinking about is how do we abstract the application layer and make it extremely simple for developers to start using these technologies. So these are two themes that you're going to hear about today. And please, one of the things that I want to hear today is how do we make it easy? Because I know that you use this on a daily basis and you probably have a lot of feedback that you're giving already, but you may not be thinking about all the developers in your ecosystem and how do we make it easy for all of them. So it's very important for us as a community to really start thinking about this and focusing on it. So let's talk about smart platforms and AI ops. The next generation of platforms, as I mentioned, will automatically be required to detect and isolate problems with data, real-time analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, using similar models. And with containers and cloud-native technologies, we see infrastructure creation, app development is happening faster. For sure, it's improved dramatically. Just an intuit, we have seen a 6x increase in velocity. How do we measure velocity? We measure velocity by looking at a release every developer does every week. That's a simple measure. What gets pushed out to our customers? I don't look at lines of code, I don't look at commits, I just look at what did our customers get at the end of the day. So when I see this, we have seen a 6x increase in the number of releases that we have done to our customers. But collectively as an industry, we have a long way to go to isolate issues in production, to improve security, operational excellence. All of these things need to be tied into an overall platform. For example, why should developers have to configure autoscaling? It should just happen. In the majority of cases, it should just happen. Why do they have to configure HPAs and VPAs? Yes, for some of you that have very complex environments, great. But for the majority of developers, they don't need to do this. For the majority of capabilities, they don't need to do this. Why do developers have to review hundreds of metrics from real user like monitoring and golden signals? Why can't a system automatically detect variances in this metric and automatically raise an alert? So when we start thinking about progressive delivery, for example, we have Argo rollouts that actually allows you to do real-time analysis based on signals. But when you actually combine this with AI models and training, and you do an automated analysis of thousands of metrics to guide the road forward and back, that's the true power of making it simple. And this is the approach that Intuit has taken, but I also know you have Adobe's here in the house today. Please welcome Adobe. And you may hear from Adobe they're taking also a similar approach in building their smart platforms. But as a guide, for example, at Intuit, our long-term goal is to be under five minutes to detect any issue and under 40 minutes to resolve any issue for any issue. Now you may say 40 minutes, that's a long time. Well, for a company that is 40 years old and has pretty much every imaginable technology that you can imagine being used, 40 minutes is actually still a tremendous improvement. So, again, the focus for us today and moving forward, I think, is two areas I really want to start thinking about and bringing the community around. Similarly, when you talk about application abstraction and velocity, you know, while Kubernetes-powered infrastructure has increased development velocity, it is still hard for app developers. You know, these developers want their app needs to be met. They don't want to configure infrastructure. Even though it's simple, they don't, right? Developers should just be able to define, for example, their ingress endpoint needs. Whether it should be internally accessible or externally, it doesn't matter. They shouldn't have to configure a service mesh and an API gateway and ALBs. Even though it's available as a service and it's easy to do, but why? A great platform experience translates app needs into infrastructure configurations automatically. Define what your app needs and the infrastructure should behave in the right manner. There are technologies and standards like the open application model that was created by Alibaba, Dapper, you know, by Microsoft. That should be part of all of our forward-looking paths, right? Bringing these technologies together should be what we do. And Argo is amazingly positioned to allow us to do this. I especially love the direction we're now taking of allowing plugins and modular add-ins to things like Argo CD. We should enable a lot of these kind of technologies to come in and to allow everyone to actually tailor their needs. So, I'm hearing rumors, by the way. I heard rumors that Argo is traveling to brand-new worlds outside of this universe. More will be revealed throughout the day about this new chapter of the Argonauts, but we do have some spaceships, actually. And today, I guess you're going to see why Argo is moving at light speed, right? So, I really, really want to again thank all of you to continue the momentum. We need your expertise. We need your help. And with that, I'd like to invite Priyanka back on stage to kick off the day. Thank you so much, Pratik. I learned so much today. Argo is really... I think this is just the beginning. I can't imagine what we'll be talking about next year. We'll already be on the other planets. So, now that we've talked about all the awesome things happening here, I'd love for us to continue this conversation today, tomorrow, and then next month at KubeCon Cloud NativeCon North America that's happening in Detroit from October 24 to 28. We would love for you all to attend. There'll be lots of Argo talks. There'll be lots of folks, as many in this room, for the new people to meet who are interested in the quadruplets, as I've started calling them in my head. And it's a chance to expand your community, welcome more people in. So, I really hope to see you all there at KubeCon Cloud NativeCon in Motown. And... So, as I mentioned, by the way, we do have a new format or a summit that we have started. Thanks to Priyanka for actually starting this. But we would like to really, really bring our end users in to hear the end user viewpoints, to understand what challenges they're facing. And so, if you're an end user, an engineering leader in an end user organization, please apply to join us at the CTO Summit. We're going to be hosting it again at KubeCon Detroit. We'd love to hear from you, host you, and drive it. Thank you very much. Thank you so much.