cdCon+GitOpsCon 2023

Terraform may not be the first tool that comes to mind when thinking about managing resources in ArgoCD. The Terraform Provider for ArgoCD can, both literally and metaphorically, bridge the worlds of IaC and GitOps. In the literal sense, it provides a relatively simple mechanism to enable application workloads to be configured using resources provisioned via Terraform. In the metaphorical sense, it provides a stepping stone between working with conventional IaC pipelines and Kubernetes-based GitOps operators. Building on the speaker's experience helping teams migrate workloads from ECS to EKS, this talk looks at the use of the Terraform provider for ArgoCD within existing Terraform-based deployment pipelines. The practice can be a powerful tool that simplifies migrating application workloads to Kubernetes; by reducing the scope of a migration effort and the impact on existing workflows, we can enable golden paths that limit the cognitive load on application teams. But, as always, there are trade-offs involved, and the approach falls short of meeting the GitOps principles.