Argo Workflows — Trivia & Interesting Facts¶
Surprising, historical, and little-known facts about Argo Workflows.
Argo started at Applatix, not Intuit¶
Argo was originally created at Applatix, a startup founded by Jesse Suen and Hong Wang in 2016. Intuit acquired Applatix in early 2018, primarily to get the Argo technology and team. The project was donated to the CNCF in 2020 and graduated in December 2022.
Argo Workflows was the first Kubernetes-native workflow engine¶
When Argo Workflows launched in 2017, it was the first workflow engine that used Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) to define and execute workflows. Each workflow step ran as a separate pod, which was novel at the time but later influenced projects like Tekton.
The DAG executor was added after users complained about step syntax¶
Argo Workflows originally only supported sequential steps syntax. The DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) executor was added in version 2.1 after users found it unnatural to express parallel pipelines as nested step arrays. The DAG syntax quickly became the preferred approach for complex workflows.
Argo's name has no official meaning¶
Unlike tools named after mythological figures or acronyms, "Argo" has no official meaning according to its creators. Some speculate it references the Argo Navis constellation or the ship from Greek mythology (Jason and the Argonauts), but the founders have never confirmed an origin story.
A single Argo workflow can orchestrate thousands of pods¶
Argo Workflows has been tested with workflows containing over 10,000 steps running concurrently as separate Kubernetes pods. At Intuit, production workflows regularly orchestrate hundreds of parallel pods for data processing pipelines that complete in minutes instead of hours.
The artifact passing mechanism was inspired by Apache Airflow¶
Argo Workflows' artifact passing system — where outputs of one step become inputs to another via S3/GCS — was inspired by Apache Airflow's XCom mechanism, but designed for Kubernetes-scale data. Unlike XCom's 48KB limit in Airflow, Argo can pass multi-gigabyte artifacts between steps.
Argo Events was a separate project that almost didn't happen¶
Argo Events, the event-driven workflow trigger system, was initially built as a community contribution rather than a core project. It was nearly abandoned in 2019 due to maintenance burden before Intuit committed engineering resources to stabilize it. It now handles millions of events per day at major organizations.
Argo Workflows replaced Jenkins at multiple Fortune 500 companies¶
Between 2019 and 2022, several Fortune 500 companies publicly described migrating from Jenkins to Argo Workflows. The primary motivation wasn't features — it was resource efficiency. Jenkins agents sat idle between jobs, while Argo pods were created on-demand and destroyed after completion.
The workflow controller was rewritten twice¶
The Argo Workflows controller was substantially rewritten twice — once in the v2.0 release to support DAGs and enhanced parallelism, and again with the "workflow archive" feature that moved completed workflow records to a database to prevent etcd from being overwhelmed by thousands of completed CRDs.
Cron workflows were the most requested feature for two years¶
Users requested cron-based scheduling for Argo Workflows for nearly two years before the CronWorkflow CRD was added in version 2.5 (2019). Before that, users had to use external cron jobs or Kubernetes CronJobs to trigger their Argo workflows on schedules.