Whenever a new technology is conceived, multiple implementations will often surface and vie with one another for dominance.In the arena of GitOps, which is becoming the de facto approach to launching new applications into a cloud native ecosystem, ArgoCD is looking to be the platform of choice.Continuous deployment services provider Octopus Deploy conducted a global survey of 660 IT professionals from a wide range of companies, two-thirds of which hold either DevOps, platform engineer or cloud infrastructure engineer roles.It found that about 50% of companies that adhere to GitOps practices use ArgoCD, with the next most popular platform, Flux, commanding only 11% of the market, according to Octopus Deploy’s State of GitOps report.The results jibe with the findings from the most recent Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) survey in which 45% of respondents used Argo to manage CI/CD pipelines, as compared to the 16% that used Flux.In that study, 77% of respondents said that their practices and tools adhere to GitOps principles, which is up from 53% in the 2022 CNCF survey.The Power and Reach of GitOpsGitOps uses the Git distributed version control system as the central source of truth to manage Kubernetes and IT infrastructure, using declarative statements to define the desired operational state.Both ArgoCD and Flux are projects hosted by the CNCF, and both were designed to support Kubernetes. But that’s where the similarities end, though. ArgoCD is a full, opinionated platform with a web interface, whereas Flux is more like a toolkit, a command line-driven interface for a set a modular controllers.Perhaps those working with Kubernetes and all its complexities may prefer a more full-service deployment package. But not helping the Flux project any is that its primary sponsor, Weaveworks, went out of business last year.Other platforms that support GitOps operations include the Argo-powered Codefresh, GitLab, Harness and Octopus Deploy.On the operations (“Ops”) side of GitOps, users have settled into IBM’s Terraform to deploy the software over the hardware, or in the cloud. Adoption of Crossplane (8%), Pulumi (7%) and Bicep (3%) trails far behind.Satisfaction With GitOpsAccording to the Octopus survey, companies with mature GitOps practices are more likely to perform better on DORA software delivery metrics, increased reliability and better security/compliance outcomes. Most in the survey agreed that GitOps improves auditability (81%) and prevents drift (78%). Respondents were less likely to say GitOps increases security (63%).The benefits of GitOps are more pronounced if organizations move past the initial stages and start to use declarative instead of imperative configurations, as well as automated configurations. Only 16% of respondents are adhering to four of the practices the study assessed. About 90% of respondents are using version control (e.g., git) and a human-readable format for configurations (e.g., YAML). At approximately 40%, the use of declarative configurations and automatically pulling of configurations from the version control is far less common.The survey respondents probably oversampled mature GitOps practitioners, but even so, a majority of respondents’ companies are only applying it to less than half of their production applications.The good news is that 26% of the organizations surveyed are applying GitOps to other parts of their technology stack. And two-thirds of respondents expect to increase their use of GitOps in the future.The post Survey: ArgoCD Leaves Flux (And Other GitOps Platforms) Behind appeared first on The New Stack.