The Cloud Native Computing Foundation said today its Technical Oversight Committee has voted to accept the Argo Project as its latest incubation-level hosted project.

Created in 2017 by a company called Applatix Inc., the Argo Project is a set of tools that enable users to run and manage applications built on Kubernetes more easily. Kubernetes is an orchestration tool that’s used to manage thousands of software containers, which host modern applications that can run on any kind of computing platform or operating system.

Applatix itself was acquired by Intuit Inc. in 2018, and that company now leads the development of the Argo Project, along with another major contributor called BlackRock.

Pratik Wadher, vice president of product development at Intuit, said the goal with the Argo Project is to help organizations build and run cloud-native applications and workflows on Kubernetes using GitOps.

Argo does that by providing an easy way to combine three modes of computing, namely services, workflows and event-based, to create jobs and applications on Kubernetes. The tools, implemented either as controllers or as customer resources, can be used in conjunction with other CNCF projects such as Prometheus and gRPC.

There are four components to Argo, including Argo Workflows, which is an open-source container-native workflow engine for orchestrating parallel jobs on Kubernetes; Argo Events, an events-based dependency manager that was created by BlackRock; Argo CD, which supports GitOps-based deployment of Kubernetes resources; and Argo Rollouts, used to support “progressive delivery strategies” for applications.

That Argo was accepted by the CNCF is not really a surprise, since the project is already being used in production by more than 100 companies, including big technology firms such as Adobe Inc., Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Datastax Inc., Google LLC, IBM Corp., Nvidia Corp. and SAP SE.

“Kubernetes has won the container wars but that does not mean that it can address all relevant programming models,” said Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller. “This is why its important the CNCF keeps adding adjacent projects. That’s what’s happening with the Argo project joining, adding workflow and events capabilities that are crucial for many next-generation application use cases.”

The Argo Projects’ backers say their hope is to continue growing the community by focusing on the continuous and progressive delivery of microservices and machine learning applications on Kubernetes.

“Given the team’s work in simplifying the use of Kubernetes and enabling GitOps, Argo fits right in with the CNCF community,” said Chris Aniszczyk, chief technology officer and chief operating officer of the CNCF.

Image: The Argo Project