Argo Workflows

Argo Workflows is an open-source, CNCF graduated workflow engine for orchestrating jobs on Kubernetes, implemented entirely as Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions rather than a separate system bolted on top of a cluster. A workflow is defined as a sequence of steps or a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of tasks, where each step runs as its own container - so anything that can run in a container, from a training job to a data transform, becomes a workflow step without extra glue code.

It's commonly used for machine learning pipelines, batch and data processing, infrastructure automation, and CI/CD, taking advantage of Kubernetes' own scheduling and scaling to run many parallel steps across a cluster rather than a single worker.

Argo Workflows is a fit for teams already running Kubernetes who want to orchestrate container-based pipelines using the cluster they already operate, a different niche than Temporal (also in this catalog), whose workflows are general-purpose functions in a language SDK rather than Kubernetes-native container steps.