chapter one

1 Why CI/CD isn’t enough

 

This chapter covers

  • Identifying the gap between CI and CD
  • Seeing where a promotion control plane fits
  • Gaining governed promotion, lineage, artifact identity
  • Walking one promotion end to end

Most modern engineering teams believe they’ve solved software delivery. They have CI pipelines that build and test code on every commit, and GitOps tools like Argo CD that deploy to Kubernetes and keep cluster state in sync with version-controlled configuration. Many would describe their processes as fully automated. And yet production releases still feel risky. The build serving customers may not be the exact one that was validated in a pre-prod environment; a mutable image tag can quietly introduce an unexpected discrepancy; and when someone asks who approved a change and whether it was verifiably tested, the answer can take days to reconstruct, if it exists at all.

1.1 The improvised layer in modern delivery

1.1.1 A five-question test for the promotion gap

1.1.2 The everyday cost of the promotion gap

1.2 Where Kargo fits in the delivery stack

1.3 Three capabilities CI and CD don’t provide

1.3.1 Governed promotion

1.3.2 Queryable lineage

1.3.3 Immutable artifact identity

1.3.4 When Kargo isn’t the right fit

1.4 Walking a promotion end to end

1.5 Summary