Deployment Automation & Argo CD Strategy¶

1. GitHub Release Best Practices¶

Create releases only for production-ready versions.
Use tags, commit history, and Argo CD history for staging/non-prod traceability.
This keeps releases meaningful, aligns with semantic versioning, and avoids clutter.

2. Automated Helm Update Workflow¶

A Makefile target update-image accepts TAG and ENV parameters.
It updates the appropriate Helm values file (config/helm/staging.yaml or config/helm/production.yaml) with the new Docker image tag.
A GitHub Actions workflow:
Can be triggered manually or on a schedule.
Calls the Makefile target.
Commits and pushes the updated Helm values.
Creates a GitHub release only for production deployments.

This ensures Helm values are automatically updated with the latest image tags immediately after new images are built and pushed, following tagging conventions and environment separation.

3. Argo CD Multi-Environment Deployment Plan¶

Namespace Strategy¶

Development: argocd-dev
Staging: argocd-stg
Production: argocd-prod

Local Development Installation¶

helm repo add argo https://argoproj.github.io/argo-helm
helm repo update

helm install argocd argo/argo-cd \
  --namespace argocd-dev \
  --create-namespace \
  --values values-dev.yaml

Promotion Process¶

Test in argocd-dev
Promote to argocd-stg via GitOps
Approve and promote to argocd-prod

Security¶

RBAC roles: readonly, developer, admin, SRE
Use sealed-secrets or AWS Secrets Manager
Environment-specific service accounts

Monitoring & Backup¶

Enable metrics, Prometheus, Grafana
Backup configs, app definitions, RBAC
Test restore procedures regularly

Resource Requirements¶

server:
  requests:
    cpu: 200m
    memory: 256Mi
repo-server:
  requests:
    cpu: 100m
    memory: 256Mi
application-controller:
  requests:
    cpu: 200m
    memory: 256Mi

Implementation Phases¶

Local Dev: Setup argocd-dev
Staging: Setup argocd-stg, test promotion
Production: Setup argocd-prod, enable backups and advanced security