What's New in Kargo v0.9.0

We’re excited to announce that Kargo v0.9.0 is here, delivering a highly anticipated shift in how you define and execute promotion processes. This release introduces flexible new building blocks for managing your GitOps workflows, along with a host of new features and improvements across the platform. There are some exciting things in this release, which we feel that will introduce a new era of flexibility for GitOps.

Revolutionizing Promotion with Promotion Steps

Kargo has taken a big step forward with Promotion Steps — a more flexible system for defining promotion processes. Initially, our promotion mechanisms were rigid, based on our internal experience and the belief that certain practices would serve most users well. However, feedback from the community indicated a need for more customization. Instead of adding layers of complexity to the old system, we decided to pivot toward a more adaptable approach.

Promotion Steps now enable users to construct promotion pipelines that can include actions like:

• Cloning repositories
• Rendering manifests using tools like helm and kustomize
• Committing and pushing changes
• Creating pull requests
• Syncing Argo CD Applications
• And much more

We think of Promotion Steps as to Continuous Delivery (CD) what GitHub Actions are to Continuous Integration (CI). This modularity opens up endless possibilities for customizing how promotions happen in your pipelines and also enables users to implement a Continuous Promotion workflow.

The Future of Customization

This release is just the beginning. Promotion Steps lay the groundwork for future integrations with third-party or custom functionalities. We plan to further isolate promotion processes into containers and publish a formal specification allowing users to build their own Promotion Steps. Keep an eye on upcoming releases as we pave the way for these exciting new features!

Note: The legacy promotion mechanisms are deprecated and will be removed in the next major release. We recommend migrating to the new system soon.

For more information, check out the updated concepts documentation and the Promotion Steps reference.

Other Major Features

• Advanced Health Checks: Thanks to @gnadaban, Kargo now supports comprehensive health checks for multi-source Argo CD Applications.
• SSO User Mapping Overhaul: @BenHesketh21’s work now allows any OIDC claims to map SSO users to Kubernetes ServiceAccounts, enhancing flexibility. This introduces a breaking change, but Kargo will automate the migration.
• Custom CA Bundles: Thanks to @lknite for making it easier to customize CA bundles used by Kargo's components.

UI Enhancements

The Kargo UI continues to evolve with plenty of improvements, including:

• Live view of in-progress promotions: Monitor each step of your pipeline in real-time.
• Hide old Freight: Clear up clutter by hiding Freight that is no longer in use.
• Enhanced pipeline view: See more detailed status information for each stage.
• Zoom in/out: Navigate large pipelines with ease.

CLI Improvements

• Persistent CLI Configuration: Your Kargo CLI settings will no longer reset when re-authenticating.
• Local Kargo Server Option: The kargo server command is now fully functional, allowing some users to run the API server locally, simplifying operations for highly-privileged users.

Security Improvements

For teams practicing full GitOps, you can now disable the API server’s access to Project Secrets during installation. This is a great security enhancement for users managing credentials outside of Kargo’s UI or CLI.

Project News

With this release, we say a heartfelt goodbye to @rbreeze, a maintainer whose extensive contributions, especially to Kargo’s UI, have left a lasting mark. At the same time, we’re thrilled to welcome @fykaa as a new maintainer, and @Marvin9 will take on a larger role in the project moving forward.

General Availability Coming Soon!

This release marks a critical milestone for the project. With the introduction of Promotion Steps and a stable set of core features, we’re now nearing General Availability (GA). Our next major release will be Kargo v1.0.0, which we expect to be GA.

Thank You to New Contributors

A big thank you to our growing community, especially those making their first contributions in this release:

• @BasJ93
• @loafoe
• @walsm232
• @lknite
• @BenHesketh21

Read the full changelog: Kargo v0.9.0 Changelog

Conclusion

We’re excited to see how the community takes advantage of the new capabilities in Kargo v0.9.0. With this version being our last pre-release before our official GA release, we invite you to our official launch event! You will hear from Akuity customers, end users, and we’ll have special guest speakers to answer questions about Kargo and our path moving forward.