The Journey from ClickOps to GitOps at Ford with Red Hat
summary
Ford manages about 50 clusters for 2,000 application teams and 8,500 namespaces and is moving everything to Argo CD on OpenShift, hitting 60% autosync already while planning Argo CD as a service. Configuration pipeline uses kustomize, Helm for nested arrays, custom Argo plugins (secret pulls, cluster UID, YAML tests) and Argo Vault integrations with GCP Workload Identity. Major pain points are multi-instance observability, operator upgrades via OLM, and cluster upgrades—current mitigation: repave or force-terminate and rebuild, expecting 2–3x footprint growth.
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chapters (19)
- 0:00Ford’s GitOps journey
- 1:28Early Kubernetes at Ford
- 3:13Argo CD for multicluster
- 5:42Argo CD plugins & observability
- 7:25Autosync progress & plans
- 8:30Testing YAML overlays
- 10:17OpenShift upgrades safely
- 11:43GitOps configuration structure
- 12:46GitOps tooling ecosystem
- 13:50Custom operators for configs
- 14:33Migrating tenant namespaces
- 15:57Scaling GitOps challenges
- 17:21Argo CD observability gaps
- 17:43Operator lifecycle limits
- 18:25Cluster upgrade issues
- 19:07Future GitOps enhancements
- 21:16Community & scalability
- 22:00Argo CD as a service
- 22:42Q&A on drift & upgrades
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