What's New in Kargo v1.3: Smarter GitOps with Conditional Steps & Advanced Verification

The Kargo team is excited to announce the release of Kargo v1.3, bringing powerful new features, enhanced flexibility, and significant user experience improvements to the Kubernetes continuous delivery ecosystem.

Kargo is for Platform Engineering and DevOps teams looking to automate progressive rollouts for their GitOps environment, enable Continuous Promotion and create repeatable CD Pipelines. For teams using Argo CD, Kargo integrates seemingly into existing workflows, providing a holistic GitOps experience.

Key Enhancements in Kargo v1.3

🔀 Conditional Step Execution

Kargo now supports conditional step execution within promotion workflows, allowing users to define if expressions that determine whether a step should be executed based on prior results. This new feature gives users finer grained control over what gets executed during a task run, reducing the amount of CD Pipelines that need to be built. This feature also sets the stage for future improvements in failure handling and error management.

apiVersion: kargo.akuity.io/v1alpha1
kind: Stage
metadata:
  name: test
  namespace: kargo-demo
spec:
  # ...
  promotionTemplate:
    spec:
      steps:
      - uses: example-step
        if: ${{ outputs.step1.someOutput == 'value'

🎛️ New Control Over Freight Requests

Users can now define an "availability strategy" to ensure freight verification across all upstream stages before becoming available in a new stage. This change enhances control and reliability in multi-stage pipelines. Now, complex multi-stage pipelines can only progress when the required downstream processes have been successful. This gives more control over to teams that need finer grain control as to what constitutes a successful promotion.

apiVersion: kargo.akuity.io/v1alpha1
kind: Stage
metadata:
   name: uat
   namespace: kargo-demo
spec:
  requestedFreight:
  - origin:
      kind: Warehouse
      name: my-warehouse
    sources:
      stages:
      - test
      - uat
    availabilityStrategy

🛡️ Advanced Stage Verification

• Expression Language Support in Arguments – Dynamic expressions can now be used within verification arguments, making it easier to pass values based on the current freight context.

• Support for ClusterAnalysisTemplates – Operators can now reference ClusterAnalysisTemplates for verification, enabling standardized verification checks across multiple projects. These templates can also be managed through the Kargo UI.

🪜 New & Enhanced Promotion Steps

• JSON & YAML Parsing Steps – New json-parse and yaml-parse steps allow users to extract values from structured data within their workflows.

• Expanded Git Platform Support – The git-open-pr and git-wait-for-pr promotion steps now support Gitea, broadening Kargo’s GitOps capabilities.

🖥️ UI & Usability Enhancements

• Resolved scaling issues in the Stage pipeline view.

• Improved ClusterAnalysisTemplate management within the UI.

🛠️ Other Notable Improvements

• Optional credential lookups for HTTP URLs.

• Enhanced wildcard (**) support for Git subscription path filtering.

• Adjustments to the Healthy condition for failed promotions.

• Resolved issues related to long Stage names causing AnalysisRun failures.

Celebrating Our Contributors

This release would not have been possible without the contributions of our dedicated community. Special thanks to first-time contributors:

• @aarontams

• @nixphix

• @mimartin12

• @joelddiaz

• @abelhoula

When is "Kargo v1.3 Available? 

Kargo v1.3 is available today. Users can upgrade by following the official documentation at docs.kargo.io and exploring the full changelog.

For more information, visit kargo.io

Explore Kargo v1.3 & Beyond

With Kargo v1.3.0, we’re bringing users closer to the future of GitOps: efficient, reliable, and scalable application delivery. Interested to keep learning? Check out these Kargo blogs for more on best practices:

1.What's New in Kargo v1.2

2.Kargo v1.0 Now Generally Available on the Akuity Platform

3. Promotion Made Easy with Kargo: Kargo for Beginners

4. Why Continuous Promotion is Essential

Head on over to https://kargo.io to try out the latest release and take advantage of these new features, and make sure to join our community to collaborate with other Kargo users: https://akuity.community

Want to know more about Kargo? Make sure you sign up for our upcoming webinar, Kargo: Revolutionizing GitOps Promotion Workflows.