Akuity adds ability to customize Kargo pipelines. Akuity this week at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe conference revealed it has added an ability to customize the steps used to promote applications into a production environment using a Kargo orchestration engine it developed to manage software using a GitOps workflow. Company CEO Hong Wang said the Custom Steps capability added to Kargo will enable software engineering teams to define any promotion logic as a native step in a pipeline, including, for example, running a policy check or security scan. The overall goal is to eliminate the need to create custom scripts or rely on manual processes to extend a GitOps workflow that is being used to move container applications into a production environment, he added. Custom Steps adds a container-based interface for defining promotion logic. Each step runs in a Kubernetes Pod at execution time, with its inputs, outputs, and result recorded in the Kargo promotion record alongside every other step in the sequence. Custom Steps are packaged as OCI images and registered to enable any team to reference a custom step by name in their promotion templates. Originally built for Kubernetes as a complement to the Argo continuous delivery (CD) platform, Kargo is now being used widely to promote software across a range of platforms, said Wang. It includes a library of built-in promotion steps covering the most common GitOps promotion operations, including Argo CD syncing, Helm and Kustomize rendering, and Terraform infrastructure management. Since the initial launch of Kargo, there have now been more than 3.5 million downloads, with Deutsche Telekom, JumpCloud and Cisco ThousandEye among the early adopters. It's not clear how many DevOps teams are moving towards a GitOps workflow that loosely couples continuous integration (CI) and CD workflows. Historically, DevOps teams have adopted CI/CD platforms to unify the management of those workflows, but as Kubernetes clusters become more widely deployed many organizations have adopted ArgoCD to separately manage CD workflows via a graphical user interface (GUI). That approach provides the added benefit of making Kubernetes environments more accessible via a higher level of abstraction. Kargo, meanwhile, provides an orchestration layer that can be more widely used to manage the pipelines that DevOps teams create to deploy software in a way that is not tied to a specific platform. Each DevOps team will need to consider how they might want to approach CD going forward. While many CI processes are automated, the percentage of DevOps teams that have automated CD is much smaller, mainly because each platform for deploying application software has a unique set of attributes. However, with the advent of orchestration layers such as Kargo there may be an opportunity to revisit how applications are deployed in production environments. Regardless of approach, the one thing that is certain is that as the volume of code being created using artificial intelligence (AI) tools continues to increase the issue one way or another will soon be forced. The issue, as always, is overcoming the current level of inertia that tends to surround any legacy approach to building and deploying applications.

Akuity, the software delivery platform built by the creators of Argo CD and Kargo, has announced record results for fiscal year 2025, surpassing 100 customers and processing 43 million deployments—a tenfold increase from the previous year. The Sunnyvale-based company, founded in 2021, reported 150% growth in new annual recurring revenue, with 80% coming from new customers. Net revenue retention reached 130%. Customers include AI infrastructure firms CoreWeave and Thinking Machines Lab, alongside Fortune 100 enterprises spanning financial services, healthcare and technology. Akuity launched AI capabilities through Akuity Intelligence, enabling users to detect degraded states, triage incidents and automate fixes. The platform now supports multi-environment delivery across Kubernetes, Terraform, virtual machines and serverless environments.

What's new in Kargo v1.8. Akuity, Inc. is thrilled to introduce Kargo v1.8, a major release packed with new features and enhancements users have been asking for - all designed to give you more control, smarter automation, and richer context in your deployment pipelines. Below is a guided tour of what's new. For full details, see the release notes. New features available in Kargo Enterprise. Introducing notifications (Enterprise). Kargo Enterprise now supports configurable notifications, so your team never misses an important event. With the new Notifications feature, you can send alerts and updates to channels like Slack and email when key actions occur - such as promotions, or failures. 1. Inline within your promotion steps - for fine-grained, context-aware messages: steps: - if: ${{ always }} uses: send-message config: channel: kind: MessageChannel name: slack message: "Kargo promotion to ${{ ctx.stage}} ${{ success? 'succeeded': 'failed' }}" 2. Reactively, using Event routing, to handle notifications for an entire project triggered by specific events and with rich message formatting: Whether you want quick, targeted updates during a deployment or centralized visibility into all your projects,Notifications make it easy to keep everyone informed - right where your team already collaborates. GitHub Actions integration (Enterprise). Kargo Enterprise now includes a GitHub Actions integration, enabling you to trigger a GitHub Actions workflow directly from a promotion step - and wait for it to complete before continuing the pipeline. This means Kargo can now coordinate seamlessly with your existing CI/CD workflows. For example, you can: * Dispatch a GitHub Actions workflow that runs integration or end-to-end tests before promoting to staging * Retag and push container images using your existing Actions workflows * Execute compliance checks or custom automation steps outside the cluster, then resume promotion once the workflow passes This feature closes the loop between GitOps and GitHub Actions, giving you tighter feedback and orchestration between systems you already use. For more detailed information, refer to the gha-dispatch-workflow documentation and gha-wait-for-workflow documentation. New features available in both OSS and Enterprise Kargo include: Drag & drop promotions. A faster, more intuitive way to promote Freight! Simply drag and drop Freight into a Stage to kick off a promotion, saving time and clicks. New and improved metadata for Freight & stages. Kargo now makes it easier to carry important context across your deployment pipeline. With the new set-metadata promotion step, you can attach arbitrary metadata to your Freight and Stage resources - and retrieve it later using the new freightMetadata and stageMetadata expression functions. This unlocks powerful automation patterns, such as: * Storing a Slack thread ID with a Freight and automatically posting updates to that same thread as it moves through stages * Passing deployment-related metadata (like commit SHAs or build IDs) between environments for traceability and auditing Together, these tools make your pipelines more connected, traceable, and flexible than ever. Expression-based Freight creation criteria. Warehouses now support expression-based criteria for automatic Freight creation - giving you precise control over when new Freights are generated. Now, when a Warehouse's Freight creation policy is set to Automatic, you can define an expression that must evaluate to true before Freight creation proceeds. For example, you can ensure a Freight is only created when front-end and back-end container images share the same version tag: You can read more about this new feature in the Working with Warehouses section of Kargo's documentation. Syncing to an upstream Stage. Kargo now supports a new auto-promotion policy called MatchUpstream, which lets a Stage stay in sync with its immediate upstream Stage, rather than always promoting the newest available Freight. This makes it easy to maintain environment consistency across your delivery pipeline. For example, you can link three production environments to ensure they all deploy identical artifacts in sequence, advancing only after verification and soak checks, and remain aligned even when a rollback occurs. You can read more about this feature in the Working with Stages section of Kargo's documentation. Kargo now includes a new git-merge-pr promotion step, allowing you to automatically merge pull requests as part of your promotion workflow. This feature is perfect for teams that open PRs primarily for audit or review purposes, but want them merged automatically once approved - streamlining the path from verification to deployment. You can read more about this feature on the git-merge-pr promotion step's reference page. Improved user-to-serviceaccount mapping. Kargo's authentication system has been upgraded with a new, more flexible format for mapping authenticated users to Kubernetes ServiceAccounts. This enhancement removes previous limitations by supporting special characters that weren't allowed in Kubernetes annotation keys - making mappings more expressive and easier to manage across different identity providers. The migration is fully automatic and requires no manual action. Your existing mappings will continue to work seamlessly after upgrading. Kargo now includes a webhook receiver for Harbor, enabling automatic Warehouse artifact discovery whenever new container images or Helm charts are pushed to your Harbor registry. This integration keeps your Warehouses instantly up to date, no manual refresh or polling required, ensuring your delivery pipelines always have the latest artifacts available for promotion. To learn more, refer to the Harbor webhook receiver reference docs. UX enhancements & other quality-of-life additions. * Favorite Projects: You can now "star" Projects so they're easier to find in contexts where your org has many of them * Freight "Clone" assembly option: Use an existing Freight as a template and select only specific artifact revisions to change - useful when you want to reuse most of the old configuration but tweak one or two artifacts. Big thank you to its first-time contributors. Thank you to the Kargo Community for their support and contributions to the project. This release would not have been possible without your support. Special shout-out to its first-time contributors: @mikedougherty, @ahockersten, @gladavius, @ianstanton, @kyounghunJang and @jobama7860. Kargo 1.8 is out - try it today! Kargo 1.8 introduces small improvements in addition to the ones discussed, so be sure to check out the full release notes here. Kargo v1.8 is out now, and Akuity, Inc. encourage you to explore everything the latest version has to offer! Interested in Kargo Enterprise? book a personalized demo today. Ready to simplify delivery with akuity? Deploy, promote, and operate applications reliably, powered by OSS you trust and Intelligence you control. Practical guidance on MTTR reduction, GitOps at scale, and safe automation, with product updates from the Argo CD and Kargo team.