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I intend to build a local Kubernetes cluster to host services in my home lab and share them with family and friends. If I'm already planning to deploy Argo CD as a GitOps solution and it'll already have a reconciliation loop for all my services, is it overkill to also use Operators for these same services? E.g. to deploy GitLab Operator through Argo CD. Would that be two tools doing the same thing, or did I get the Operator concept wrong?

donjuardo
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1 Answers1

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I only used Fluxcd in the past so I'm not 107% confident it will work in exactly the same way in Argos but what I needed to do was to deploy those deployments in stages. In the first stage I've deployed an operator application itself, together with its CRDs. One of the CRDs would be e.g an IstioOperator or GitLab in your case.

After that stage was deployed to the cluster (especially after the CRDs got applied), there was the next stage depending on the first one, which was deploying a single manifest file like e.g.:

apiVersion: apps.gitlab.com/v1beta1
kind: GitLab
metadata:
  name: gitlab
spec:
  chart:
    version: "X.Y.Z" # https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/cloud-native/gitlab-operator/-/blob/0.8.1/CHART_VERSIONS
    values:
      global:
        hosts:
          domain: example.com # use a real domain here
        ingress:
          configureCertmanager: true
      certmanager-issuer:
        email: youremail@example.com # use your real email address here

As you can see, the manifest is a simple "recipe" monitored by the operator application which would deploy all the required GitLab resources according to the manifest above.

From my experience, the first stage is responsible for keeping the operator application installed and running on its proper version release etc. The second stage is keeping the "recipe" file synced and reconciling its content, in case somebody e.g. changed its values directly in the Kubernetes cluster. On the other hand, the Operator agent will take care of keeping the deployed resources right according to the "recipe" manifest.

In general, I believe Argos needs to behave in a similar way as you can't apply GitLab manifest before you created the CRD defining it etc.

Oliniusz
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