Important: I recongnized this approach is based on a false understanding of the application-of-applications pattern. As long as every dev-team needs to create their application-definitions in the argocd namespace, they are also allowed to create new repository definitions where they are allowed to deploy everything to every namespace. And as long as their is no inheritance-feature of project definitions, the platform-team can't force any restrictions in project definitions. However, here is my approach, even if the implementation won't work as designed ;)

I like to describe how I think a Multi-Team k8s-Cluster could be managed with ArgoCD.

Requirements:

• easy bootstrapping of a new Cluster
• use ArgoCD also for Disaster/Recovery
• easy "application onboarding" of new applications but with necessary controls of compliance and policies
• completely self-service and freedom for dev-teams, as long as no other team gets hurt
• creating namespaces is something the platform-team needs to do, because of default-policies, security and resource-quotas. however, thats maybe something to discuss in the future.

How it may look like:

Procedures:

1. The first step for a new k8s-Cluster would be: 1.1. install ArgoCD 1.2. install bootstrap application with "kubectl apply -f <gitrepo>/k8s-bootstrap-application.yaml" from this point on everything in the k8s-platform.git repo gets synced

2. each dev-team which wants to host applications on this cluster must: 2.1 merge a <team>-applications.yaml in the k8s-platform.git repo (must be accepted by the platform team)

3. for each application the dev-team must: 2.1 merge a <team>-namespaces.yaml in the k8s-platform.git repo for the new namespace (must be accepted by the platform team) 2.2 merge <team>-project.yaml which contains the new <application>-infra repo und destination namespace in the k8s-platform.git repo (must be accepted by the platform team) 2.3 create <application>.yaml in the <team>-application.git 2.4 create <application>-infra.git repo where the actual infrastructure is defined

Somehow it currently seems that there are too many merge-requests per application, which a platform-team must accept. There is some room for improvement.

Questions:

• could a dev-team create applications in a <team>-application.git repo if the super application <team>-application doesn't define the argocd namespace as a destination namespace?
• is it possible that applications in a <team>-application.git repo reference other projects than the super application <team>-application itself? If so, each dev-team can define its own unrestricted project-definitions and use this as a project. would be a bad security issue. That seems to be true, which is a showstopper for this concept.
• could teams create argocd repository objects in their own <team>-application.git repo? otherwise each new repo for a new application must be merged and accepted by the platform-team. __They can, but project definitions do not get inherit from the super application. So a new project definition in the <team>-application.git repo can contain definitions which are evil.
• is it possible to use regular expressions in the <team>-project.yaml for the source repository? otherwhise each no repo for an app must be merged and accepted by the platform-team.

Possible improvements:

• the ArgoCD manifests and the application-of-applications pattern is maybe not so easy to understand at the first place for everybody. So maybe we developers should merge some custom YAMl files to the k8s-platform.git and a CI-Pipeline creates the necessary ArgoCD manifests and namespaces manifests. This CI-Pipeline can also include some checks for naming conventions and policy enforcements.