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Environment promotion using Kargo and Gitops

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By Patrice Tran
1 min read
Environment promotion using Kargo and Gitops

Kargo project promotion flow

Intent

Manage Kubernetes manifests across different environments using GitOps.

Kargo

Kargo is a promotion orchestration layer that complements Argo CD.

It runs as a Kubernetes controller and follows GitOps principles. It aims to simplify the promotion of applications defined using Helm charts, raw Kubernetes manifests, or Kustomize, while making promotions trackable and reversible.

Kargo uses several concepts specific to the tool, which we will cover in the sections below:

  • Projects
  • Warehouse
  • Freight
  • Stages

Projects

A project is represented as a Kubernetes Project resource and contains all the Kargo resources associated with it, including Warehouses, Freight, Stages, and credentials.

Warehouse

A Warehouse watches for and discovers various types of artifact sources, including:

  • Container image repositories
  • Git repositories
  • Helm chart repositories

Freight

A single “piece of freight” is a set of references to one or more versioned artifacts discovered by a Warehouse. These artifacts may include:

  • Container images (from image repositories)
  • Kubernetes manifests (from Git repositories)
  • Helm charts (from chart repositories)

Stages

Stages represent the different environments for a given project, such as test, staging, and production.

In practice

This repository was used to test Kargo.

Before trying the example, follow the official quickstart instructions to deploy Kargo in your local environment.

What I want to explore next

Explore deeper integration with RBAC and identity management (SSO).

Conclusion

Kargo is a solid tool; however, it introduces:

  • Another infrastructure layer with its own terminology and mechanisms for a team to learn.
  • Some interesting features are available only in the Enterprise plan, such as infrastructure-aware promotion of Terraform code, notifications, custom promotion steps and automatic rollbacks.
  • I am not a fan of having a tool commit back to GitHub because it introduces a security risk. Kargo needs a GitHub PAT or a deployment key with write access to commit to the repository.
  • A Kargo commit could accidentally trigger downstream CI/CD pipelines.
automation, containers
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