Verify the Argo CD capability

The prepare-environment step has already enabled the Argo CD capability on the cluster and federated it with AWS Identity Center. Before deploying anything, let's confirm it's ACTIVE and that the Argo CD custom resources are available.

Inspect the capability resource directly:

~$aws eks describe-capability \

--cluster-name $EKS_CLUSTER_AUTO_NAME \

--capability-name $EKS_CAP_ARGOCD_CAPABILITY \

--query 'capability.status' --output text

ACTIVE

A capability transitions through CREATING → ACTIVE. If the status here is anything other than ACTIVE, wait a moment and re-run the command — the capability may still be initializing.

The capability publishes the URL of its managed Argo CD server. It was exported into your shell as $EKS_CAP_ARGOCD_URL:

~$echo $EKS_CAP_ARGOCD_URL

https://....argocd.eks.amazonaws.com

Now check that the Argo CD controller's custom resources are registered in the cluster:

~$kubectl api-resources --api-group=argoproj.io

NAME             SHORTNAMES   APIVERSION                       NAMESPACED   KIND

applications     app,apps     argoproj.io/v1alpha1             true         Application

applicationsets  appset,as    argoproj.io/v1alpha1             true         ApplicationSet

appprojects      appproj,...  argoproj.io/v1alpha1             true         AppProject

info

Just like the ACK capability, we never installed a Helm chart and there's no argocd-server Pod running on your worker nodes. The Argo CD control plane runs in AWS-managed infrastructure outside the cluster — what you see inside the cluster are the CRDs the capability registered, which you'll use to declare Applications.

The capability is also federated with the Identity Center group (its UUID — see Sign in to Argo CD via Identity Center) that grants the Argo CD ADMIN role:

~$echo $EKS_CAP_ARGOCD_ADMIN_GROUP_ID

########-####-####-####-############

With the capability ACTIVE and the CRDs in place, we're ready to deliver the catalog service via GitOps.