# Introduction

Managing Kubernetes gets tricky fast when you’re dealing with multiple clusters. That’s where ArgoCD comes in—a GitOps tool that brings sanity back to cluster management.

At the beginning of your Kubernetes journey you usually start with only one running cluster, but as your needs grow things become a lot more complex. With each additional cluster the chances of making manual changes causing issues increases as well.

# The Challenge of Managing Multiple Clusters

Deploying across clusters isn’t the only thing that can turn into a headache. You also need to think about managing all the other core services your clusters need—load balancer controllers, ingresses, secret managers, monitoring—and keeping them all updated across clusters can be a nightmare.

# The Manual Approach and Its Limitations

I used to handle all of this manually. I had a k8s repo with all the necessary YAML, set up using Helm, kustomize, or just plain files. But as the number of clusters grew, it got harder to keep everything consistent between what’s defined in the repo and what’s actually deployed. That’s when I decided to set up ArgoCD. The main issue is that I would forget to rollout changes to one or more clusters and the deployed core services would be using different versions and be inconsistent.

# Setting Up ArgoCD in an Orchestration VPC

I chose to run ArgoCD in what I call an “orchestration VPC.” I didn’t want it living inside one of the actual environments it manages. Putting ArgoCD in an orchestration VPC just felt cleaner—it didn’t make sense for prod to manage dev, or vice versa. Plus, this keeps it ready for other shared services down the road.

# Centralized vs. Distributed ArgoCD

I thought about putting ArgoCD in every environment, and it was tempting. But that would add a lot of extra work—more overhead to maintain a tool that’s supposed to make things easier. So I kept it centralized instead. Centralizing it also meant I could troubleshoot everything from one place—less context-switching when things went sideways.

# Bootstrapping ArgoCD with “Inception”

I set up ArgoCD by creating a folder in my k8s repo called “inception.” I used that to bootstrap ArgoCD. Once it was running, I set it up to manage itself with an application—an “ArgoCD app that updates ArgoCD.” I used that to bootstrap ArgoCD, and then set it up to manage itself. This way, any changes to ArgoCD configs go through the same process as everything else: a git commit. By managing itself, ArgoCD stays in sync without extra manual intervention—everything goes through git.

# Making a Kubernetes Cluster “Ready” with ArgoCD

For me, ArgoCD’s main job is to take a new Kubernetes cluster and get it “ready.” It installs all the basics—controllers, operators, whatever I need before any application workloads start deploying. While ArgoCD can handle deployments, I stick with GitHub Actions for apps because it triggers instantly—ArgoCD’s polling mechanism can be too slow when you want a quick deploy. I could expose ArgoCD so that it can accept webhooks from Github to update faster, but I did not want to expose ArgoCD to the internet.

# Pain Points: User Management and Resource Limits

ArgoCD definitely has some pain points. User management, for example, can be a bit annoying. The first thing you want to do after logging in with the default admin user is hook it up to central authentication using Dex. There are guides for providers like Google and Okta, but it’s not exactly seamless.

Another thing to watch out for is resource requests and limits for ArgoCD itself. If your cluster has other things running on it, and ArgoCD’s deployments don’t have those limits set, you could run into trouble. Other workloads might hog resources, leaving ArgoCD struggling. I patched the base install.yaml with kustomize to add those limits and make sure ArgoCD runs smoothly.

Despite these issues, ArgoCD has made managing clusters a lot smoother for me—it’s just a matter of getting the setup right.

# Wrapping Up

Managing multiple Kubernetes clusters can go from tricky to downright overwhelming without the right tools. ArgoCD has made a big difference for me—it takes care of a lot of the chaos, helps keep everything consistent, and has turned cluster setup into a much smoother process. With the right setup, ArgoCD becomes that reliable sidekick that keeps things running clean and simple, letting you focus more on what you’re building, not how you’re managing it all.