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Flux for me was always superior to ArgoCD from a technical point of view, but they over the years ArgoCD became the more popular tool. I wonder if it was market

by pmig 3y ago

Flux for me was always superior to ArgoCD from a technical point of view, but they over the years ArgoCD became the more popular tool. I wonder if it was marketing, the missing UI or something else? But super sad to see weaveworks shutting down I hope that the open source projects will continue to evolve.

FourierEnvy 3y ago
Better UI
- mac-chaffee 3y ago
  I personally consider the ArgoCD UI an anti-feature. Attaching some hulking mass of Javascript dependencies to the thing that has cluster-admin rights to my production cluster is unnecessary attack surface for me. ArgoCD also has its own auth system and permissions. You give ArgoCD cluster-admin rights, then it uses impersonation to pretend like it has lower permissions. One little bug there and you can trick ArgoCD into escalating your permissions, which happens a lot: https://github.com/argoproj/argo-cd/security/advisories/GHSA-2f5v-8r3f-8pww https://github.com/argoproj/argo-cd/security/advisories/GHSA... While not officially supported, you can technically deploy Flux with limited permissions, but ArgoCD's dependence on impersonation means it cannot run with lower permissions.
  - nullify88 3y ago
    Redis is also a requirement to run Argo CD. When comparing load on my home server, flux was much lighter. Flux also has a pretty cool terraform controller too. At work though, we use Argo and our developers use its gui to get an overview on their applications.
alwyn 3y ago
I've never used Flux, only Argo, but can you share a bit from your point of view on why you find Flux to be technically superior? Thanks!
- pmig 3y ago
  One if the decision points for us using Flux was the the helm controller. ArgoCD will just render the helm chart and apply the manifests. If you already habe an Helm Release in your cluster the migration path was easier with flux.
  - preisschild 3y ago
    Not to mention that because of this, ArgoCD doesn't support some Helm functions at all, like `lookup` (which looks up resources in your cluster).
arccy 3y ago
there was a ui, and they fumbled their flux -> flux2
shurup 3y ago
I guess it was UI, indeed. Whatever "true engineers" think or say, it is an attractive option for many potential users (think not of Ops only, but of Devs, too). Therefore, it brings a bigger audience, i.e. more adopters, more contributors, more integrations, more whatever…
denysvitali 3y ago
The UI makes it easier to sell it to non-engineers. Not that you need to "buy" anything - but IIRC the only offering that Flux had was a SaaS feature that sort of gave you an UI. If the UI was what you were looking for, you'd go with ArgoCD. Finally, I think they messed up the Flux 1 -> 2 migration as they weren't compatible with each other. For my own use case, instead of migrating to 2 I have just switched to ArgoCD. Feature-wise, ArgoCD always seemed one step ahead, and more people seemed to prefer ArgoCD over Flux - and this can probably be seen also by the fact that they had an "ArgoCon" but there was never a "FluxCon". Don't get me wrong, I love(d) Flux and I always rooted for that - but over time I switched to ArgoCD and never looked back. In the end, they were two products doing pretty much the same thing, under the CNCF umbrella.

by pmig 3y ago

FourierEnvy 3y ago

Better UI

mac-chaffee 3y ago
I personally consider the ArgoCD UI an anti-feature. Attaching some hulking mass of Javascript dependencies to the thing that has cluster-admin rights to my production cluster is unnecessary attack surface for me. ArgoCD also has its own auth system and permissions. You give ArgoCD cluster-admin rights, then it uses impersonation to pretend like it has lower permissions. One little bug there and you can trick ArgoCD into escalating your permissions, which happens a lot: https://github.com/argoproj/argo-cd/security/advisories/GHSA-2f5v-8r3f-8pww https://github.com/argoproj/argo-cd/security/advisories/GHSA... While not officially supported, you can technically deploy Flux with limited permissions, but ArgoCD's dependence on impersonation means it cannot run with lower permissions.
- nullify88 3y ago
  Redis is also a requirement to run Argo CD. When comparing load on my home server, flux was much lighter. Flux also has a pretty cool terraform controller too. At work though, we use Argo and our developers use its gui to get an overview on their applications.

alwyn 3y ago

I've never used Flux, only Argo, but can you share a bit from your point of view on why you find Flux to be technically superior? Thanks!

pmig 3y ago
One if the decision points for us using Flux was the the helm controller. ArgoCD will just render the helm chart and apply the manifests. If you already habe an Helm Release in your cluster the migration path was easier with flux.
- preisschild 3y ago
  Not to mention that because of this, ArgoCD doesn't support some Helm functions at all, like `lookup` (which looks up resources in your cluster).

arccy 3y ago

there was a ui, and they fumbled their flux -> flux2

shurup 3y ago

I guess it was UI, indeed. Whatever "true engineers" think or say, it is an attractive option for many potential users (think not of Ops only, but of Devs, too). Therefore, it brings a bigger audience, i.e. more adopters, more contributors, more integrations, more whatever…

denysvitali 3y ago

The UI makes it easier to sell it to non-engineers. Not that you need to "buy" anything - but IIRC the only offering that Flux had was a SaaS feature that sort of gave you an UI. If the UI was what you were looking for, you'd go with ArgoCD. Finally, I think they messed up the Flux 1 -> 2 migration as they weren't compatible with each other. For my own use case, instead of migrating to 2 I have just switched to ArgoCD. Feature-wise, ArgoCD always seemed one step ahead, and more people seemed to prefer ArgoCD over Flux - and this can probably be seen also by the fact that they had an "ArgoCon" but there was never a "FluxCon". Don't get me wrong, I love(d) Flux and I always rooted for that - but over time I switched to ArgoCD and never looked back. In the end, they were two products doing pretty much the same thing, under the CNCF umbrella.