chapter one
1 Why CI/CD isn’t enough
This chapter covers
- Pinpointing the gap "fully automated" CI/CD leaves between building software and running it in production
- Understanding what a promotion control plane is and where Kargo fits
- Seeing what Kargo makes possible: governed promotion, auditable lineage, and deterministic rollback
- Walking a single artifact end to end through a Kargo promotion
- Setting up the tools and infrastructure a Kargo deployment needs
Most modern engineering teams believe they’ve solved software delivery. They have CI pipelines that build and test code on every commit, deploy to Kubernetes, and use GitOps tools like Argo CD to keep the cluster state in sync with version-controlled configuration. Many describe their process as fully automated, and by most conventional definitions, they’re right. And yet production releases still feel risky. The build serving customers may not be the exact one that passed staging; a rollback can quietly pull a different image than the one it replaced; and when someone asks who approved a change and what evidence backed it, the answer can take days to reconstruct, if it exists at all.