Introducing Kargo: A Multi‑Stage Application Orchestration Platform for CI/CD on Kubernetes

Kelsey Hightower, former Google engineer and consultant for Akuity (the company behind Argo CD), introduces a new open‑source project called Kargo, designed to improve continuous delivery workflows on Kubernetes.

The talk outlines common challenges in CI/CD: while many aim for fully automated deployments, real‑world pipelines involve multiple environments, manual approvals, testing, and gradual rollouts, making simple CI pipelines insufficient.

A clear distinction is drawn between CI pipelines, which are short‑lived jobs that produce artifacts, and CD pipelines, which continuously evaluate and safely promote those artifacts across environments, requiring flexibility that traditional CI tools lack.

Limitations of Argo CD are highlighted: it manages declarative state for a single target, lacks a pipeline concept, cannot write changes back to Git, and does not perform post‑sync validation or testing.

Kargo is presented as a solution built on Argo CD experience; it enables declarative definition of application stages (e.g., Dev, Staging, Prod), establishes relationships between stages via subscriptions, and introduces the concept of "freight"—a logical collection of artifacts (images, config) that can be promoted.

The workflow includes building a Docker image, scanning it, committing the change to a Git repository, syncing to the dev environment, verifying the update, and then promoting the freight to production, all orchestrated through Kargo’s CLI and API.

Key features of Kargo include a unified view of all environments and deployment targets, audit trails, first‑class GitOps support with Git write‑back and easy rollbacks, progressive delivery capabilities such as canary releases and A/B testing, and the ability to safely promote only qualified and verified changes.