The News
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has released its 2025 Argo CD End User Survey, revealing that nearly 60% of Kubernetes clusters now rely on Argo CD for continuous delivery. The report highlights broad production usage, deepening alignment with platform engineering teams, and continued scalability improvements driven by Argo CD 3.0.
Read the full 2025 Argo CD End User Survey results here.
Analysis
As cloud-native adoption matures, GitOps has evolved from a niche pattern to a mainstream operating model. The latest CNCF data shows Argo CD now powers nearly 60% of Kubernetes clusters surveyed which is up from prior years and reflective of growing production confidence. This is a major signal for platform teams and developers seeking reproducibility, auditability, and scalability across environments. Our research supports this trend, noting that infrastructure-as-code and Git-centric pipelines are foundational to emerging internal developer platforms (IDPs) and self-service DevOps initiatives.
Argo CD as the GitOps Control Plane
Argo CD’s growing footprint, particularly its presence in environments managing 500+ applications or spanning 20+ clusters, suggests it is becoming a de facto standard for multi-cluster, multi-tenant deployments. The jump in usage by platform engineers (now 37% of respondents) further cements Argo CD’s role as an architectural component for developer experience. Its integration with Git workflows, drift detection, and automation primitives like AppSets and auto-sync may allow teams to operationalize security, compliance, and delivery patterns at scale with minimal toil.
Legacy Tooling Gaps Still Persist
While Argo CD excels in continuous delivery, it falls short in handling environment promotion, an area where many teams still rely on custom scripting. This fragmentation shows a broader problem in the GitOps ecosystem: no consensus yet exists on multi-environment orchestration, especially for progressive delivery or canary workflows. Tools like GitOps Promoter, Kargo, and Codefresh GitOps are beginning to address these gaps, but their adoption is not yet standardized. Developers building IDPs or enterprise GitOps stacks must still piece together solutions to support full pipeline promotion workflows.
Scaling GitOps Without Rebuilding Your Stack
With the release of Argo CD 3.0 and a Net Promoter Score of 79, teams could have greater confidence scaling the tool across complex environments. However, operational success still hinges on how developers structure repositories, manage secrets, and enforce policy. Platform engineers may increasingly lean on ecosystem tooling (e.g., Argo Rollouts, policy engines, or external orchestrators) to extend capabilities without rewriting core workflows. The emphasis going forward will likely shift from “getting Argo CD running” to “operationalizing it as a service” across large, federated teams.
Looking Ahead
As GitOps becomes foundational to software delivery in Kubernetes-native environments, Argo CD is likely to remain a critical component of cloud-native platforms. However, growth will depend on closing key gaps around environment promotion, secrets management, and policy governance.
CNCF’s survey reflects a shift in how teams deliver infrastructure and applications at scale. Argo CD’s future may involve tighter integrations with developer portals, IDPs, and GitOps-aware security tools, allowing developers to focus more on shipping code and less on managing the delivery pipeline.
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