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Akuity.io

[On-Demand Webinar]

GitOps 101: Getting Started with Kargo

Getting started with Kargo: how GitOps promotion moves releases from dev to staging to production with Argo CD.

Taylor Thomas, Staff Software Engineer and Kargo maintainer at Akuity, walks through the GitOps basics behind Kargo, the open-source promotion tool built by the creators of Argo CD. He shows where Kargo sits between CI and Argo CD, defines warehouses, freight, and stages, then demos a dev, staging, and prod pipeline with verification, a pull request approval gate, and a rollback to earlier freight. Community Q&A covers replacing GitHub Actions scripts, two-registry setups, per-service Helm chart promotion, soak time, preview environments, and promotion windows in Kargo 1.12

Key Takeaways:

  • Kargo promotes; Argo CD deploys. Kargo prepares the desired state (renders manifests, updates a values file, commits to Git), then tells Argo CD to sync. CI still builds and tests artifacts. Kargo replaces the custom scripts that sit between CI and deployment.

  • Freight keeps code and config versions in lockstep. A warehouse watches Git repositories, container registries, Helm charts, and OCI artifacts, and produces freight: one versioned bundle (for example, an image tag, a Git commit, and a chart version) that moves through stages as a unit.

  • Stages are flexible by design. A stage can be an environment, a cluster, a region, or a single service. Freight only advances after it is verified in the previous stage, and each stage has its own policy: auto promotion to dev, a PR approval for staging, a required soak time before prod.

  • Promotions record what deployment pipelines don't. Each promotion records which freight moved, who started it, and which policy it passed. Verification runs Argo Rollouts analysis (a curl test in the demo; metric checks also work), and rolling back is a promotion of earlier freight.

  • A first pipeline can be three steps. Git clone, YAML update, Git push. Built-in steps such as Helm chart update and OCI push cover per-service chart bumps and re-tagging a signed image into a production registry, and that core functionality is in open-source Kargo.

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