Argo CD GitOps Promotions with Kargo (by Akuity): A Brilliant Idea with Flawed Execution?

Kargo, a tool for managing release promotions in GitOps workflows, shows promise but has significant flaws in its current version 1 release. While its vision of standardizing promotions is excellent, its limited integration with other workflow tools, poor documentation, and strong opinions about branching strategies create challenges for adoption. Despite these issues, the core idea of Kargo is valuable, and with further development, it could become a crucial tool for GitOps practitioners.

GitOps Workflow Issues

• 00:01:51 GitOps tools like Argo CD have fragmented workflows, leading to a need for tools to manage promotions and reintegrate workflows. Kargo aims to solve this by decoupling deployments from existing workflows. However, the speaker finds the approach of breaking the workflows into independent parts and integrating them back together has been incomplete and flawed.

Kargo's Promotion Capabilities

• 00:01:30 Kargo is designed to orchestrate promotions of releases managed by GitOps tools, especially Argo CD. The core idea of Kargo is a great way to standardize promotion practices. The speaker sees a lot of potential in its ability to help automate the promotion process, but notes the current implementation has limitations.

Kargo's Usage of Branches

• 00:18:18 Kargo creates individual branches for each environment within a Git repository, which differs from traditional GitOps workflows. Each branch only contains the YAML manifests, and cargo wipes the branch clean before generating a new manifest, effectively isolating each environment's configuration. However, the speaker is not entirely convinced that this approach is ideal.

Kargo's Integration Limitations

• 00:23:37 Kargo's lack of integrations with workflow tools hinders its usability, as it only offers manual promotion through CLI commands. The speaker believes that Kargo should offer ways to trigger promotions after task execution and provide hooks to signal promotion completion to external tools. This limitation hinders seamless integration with other CI/CD processes.

Kargo's Documentation and Maturity

• 00:28:15 Kargo's documentation is considered poor and contains errors, making it difficult to use and understand. The speaker believes that, despite claiming version 1 status, Kargo is still in an early beta or even alpha stage. While the core idea of Kargo is great, its current state doesn't fully deliver on the vision.