In modern software delivery pipelines, managing multi-stage deployments in Kubernetes environments has become increasingly complex. Tools like Argo CD and Flux often leave a gap when it comes to multi-stage promotions. As applications progress through environments like dev, staging, and prod, teams struggle with maintaining consistency and managing custom scripts.

Tools like 'GitOps Promoter' by Argo offer a promising approach to this problem, but are still in their experimental phase, limiting their readiness for production. Other enterprise solutions offer robust features but come with licensing costs, which can be a barrier for teams.

We’ll explore Kargo, a Kubernetes-native OSS tool for automating multi-stage promotions, and compare it with GitOps Promoter. We’ll walk through their design choices, strengths, and tradeoffs with a live demo so users can see how each tool handles this and choose the approach that best fits their GitOps workflow, without ever relying on custom scripts.

Nitish Kumar is a Software Engineer at Akuity working on the core Argo team. He is a maintainer of the CNCF-graduated project Argo CD and a former Release Team member of the Kubernetes project. Outside of work, Nitish enjoys playing chess and travelling.

Faeka Ansari is a software engineer at Akuity, where she works on Kargo, a secure and scalable GitOps platform built on Kubernetes. With a strong foundation in Go and cloud-native technologies, she is actively contributing to the Kubernetes ecosystem as a CNCF Ambassador and Sub-project Maintainer. Faeka leads the LWKD newsletter under Kubernetes SIGs, curating weekly updates for the broader community and maintaining its GitHub repository. Her prior experience includes internships at Lineaje, Nirmata, and The Linux Foundation, where she collaborated with Istio maintainers on the Ambient Mesh usage guide. Passionate about open source, developer advocacy, and cloud-native infrastructure, Faeka continues to shape the future of Kubernetes and service mesh technologies.