What's New in Kargo v1.4
Anjelica Ambrosio
Kargo has been promoted to version 1.4! The Kargo Team has been hard at work bringing innovative new features to Kargo v1.4. In addition to these new features, we’ve been implementing minor bug fixes and improvements to enhance user experience.
Here’s the rundown of the new features:
Annotations Support
Promotions Actor Metadata
AnalysisRunLogs are now available via Kargo UIPromotionTasksandClusterPromotionTasksresources are now accessible through Kargo UIFaster logins after token expiration with Kargo CLI
Before we dive into the exciting new additions to Kargo, let’s review.
What is Kargo?
Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) are software development approaches that automate the process of building, testing, and deploying code commits/changes. However, as technology evolves and workflows become more complex, traditional CI/CD practices become more nuanced; CI/CD falls short. To bridge the gap, a new concept, Continuous Promotion emerged.
Continuous Promotion allows for the automated movement of code, its configurations, and artifacts through the various stages of application development. This saves development teams time manually performing these actions without sacrificing quality and security.
Kargo embodies Continuous Promotion by automating progressive rollouts from one environment (a.k.a. stage) to another.
New Feature: Annotations
Starting with Kargo 1.4, any annotations associated with a container image can be accessed within your promotion processes using expressions. The details of your annotations will be included in your freight.
New Feature: Actor Metadata
Need more info on who did what? Metadata about the person who triggered a promotion is available through expressions within your promotion processes.
New Feature: AnalysisLogs
Kargo, which has supported post-promotion verification using Argo Rollouts, introduces a new feature to address the challenge of accessing job metric logs. Job metrics, which are implemented as Kubernetes Jobs, give Kargo users the flexibility to define any tests they’d like to run against a stage, all by providing an appropriate job specification. However, the inability to access job metrics logs from a Job’s underlying Pods via the Kargo UI can hinder users. This challenge stems from the distributed nature of Kargo controllers and the need to create logs from the many remote clusters available to the Kargo API server.
To combat this challenge, users can now optionally define a URL template and map of HTTP headers. This enables the Kargo API server to create a URL for any Job metric’s log and stream it straight to the UI, as long as it’s accessible via an HTTP GET request.
Kargo admins are responsible for shipping and storing these logs. However, if you access Kargo through the Akuity Platform, log forwarding and storage are seamlessly handled for you.
Small Improvements, Big Impact
This time around, we’ve made numerous small bug fixes to the Kargo UI, as well as one major improvement: PromotionTask and ClusterPromotionTask resources can now be easily managed through the Kargo UI.
Also, while using the Kargo CLI, re-logging into a Kargo API server when your token (and/or refresh token) has expired is now much easier. Now, you only need to use kargo login, with all other arguments and flags inherited from the previous login. This can significantly reduce the time it would take to re-login once your token expires, so users can quickly resume making promotions with Kargo.
Check out the full changelog here for a more detailed list of every improvement in Kargo v1.4.
Special Thanks
We’d like to thank the Kargo Community for their support; this release would not have been possible without your contributions. Shout-out to our first-time contributors:
Continue Exploring Kargo
Interested in continuing your learning journey about our continuous promotion tool, Kargo?
Learn More in the Upcoming Kargo Community Meeting
Want a closer look at what’s new in Kargo 1.4? Join us for a live webinar on April 30 at 8 AM PST / 11 AM ET / 5 PM CET to explore new features and what’s coming next.
Try It for Yourself
Kargo is always evolving and version 1.4 is one of our biggest steps forward yet. Hop on Kargo today to try out the latest features version 1.4 has to offer and keep track of the latest Kargo releases here.
