Establish a PEEKS/OAP visual brand (ArgoCD UI via argocd-cm as first enabler)

[allamand]

Summary

Establish a consistent visual brand / identity for PEEKS and OAP across the workshop surfaces, so the environment feels like a cohesive AWS-branded platform rather than a set of default upstream tools. Customizing the managed ArgoCD UI via argocd-cm (Configuration V2) is one of the enablers for this.

Goal

A recognizable, consistent look-and-feel (colors, banner, logo, naming) applied wherever the user lands in the platform — starting with the GitOps control plane (ArgoCD), and extensible to other UIs (Backstage, dashboards, docs).

First enabler — ArgoCD UI via argocd-cm

The EKS managed ArgoCD capability supports a subset of argocd-cm settings (Configuration V2, GA). Add an example argocd-cm (namespace argocd, label app.kubernetes.io/part-of: argocd) that brands the ArgoCD UI:

• Banner identifying the platform and linking to the workshop repo (ui.bannercontent, ui.bannerurl, ui.bannerpermanent, ui.bannerposition).
• Custom CSS (ui.cssurl) — AWS-styled banner + an added platform icon next to the native logo (kept, not replaced). The custom logo key (ui.logourl) is not supported by the capability, so branding the logo is done via CSS (::after on the logo container, pointer-events: none so the collapse arrow stays clickable).
  • Constraint: the CSS must be served as text/css. A raw GitHub file is served as text/plain + nosniff and is blocked by browsers as a stylesheet — serve it through a CDN that rewrites the content-type, SHA-pinned.
• Keep native health colors intact (ArgoCD sets them inline) — the CSS must not mask Degraded/red.

Related enablers (same brand effort)

• Performance / hygiene via resource.exclusions (exclude high-churn types like metrics.k8s.io) and a global resource.customizations.ignoreDifferences for the cross-cutting ExternalSecret status/metadata block (today repeated per-addon across the registries). It merges (Appends) with per-app spec.ignoreDifferences, so it can be adopted incrementally.

Notes / constraints

• Two-plane model: the capability API controls identity/namespace/network/RBAC only; behaviour and UI settings live in the argocd-cm ConfigMap in-cluster.
• Unsupported keys (configManagementPlugins, exec.enabled, ui.logourl, …) are silently ignored by the capability — no error surfaced.
• Reference: EKS docs — Configure Argo CD settings

Next

A PR will add the branded argocd-cm manifest + CSS/icon assets (committed in-repo, served as text/css, SHA-pinned) and de-duplicate the redundant per-addon ignoreDifferences. Broader brand work (other UIs, naming) tracked separately.