Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) are fundamental to DevOps and platform engineering, enabling automated workflows from code commit to production deployment. They foster collaboration between development and operations teams, allowing for frequent, reliable software releases.
However, as cloud-native computing introduces more complex, branching pipelines and workflows, the traditional CI/CD frameworks often fall short in addressing the nuanced challenges faced by organizations nowadays.
This gap has led to the emergence of what we would like to call "Continuous Promotion", a concept designed to bridge these shortcomings by providing a more granular approach towards promoting software-related artifacts through different stages and environments.
In this piece, we will see why Continuous Promotion is essential to complete your cloud-native CI/CD processes, its benefits added on top of conventional CI/CD and DevOps processes, and how Kargo, our innovative open-source project, offers a comprehensive solution to these contemporary challenges.
The Evolution of CI and CD
Origins of Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration (CI) emerged in the early 2000s as a key practice in Agile software development. It was designed to mitigate integration challenges by frequently merging code changes into a shared repository. This practice aimed to detect integration issues early, reduce development cycles, and improve software quality.
CI involves automated testing and builds to ensure new code does not break existing functionality. By encouraging small, incremental changes and continuous feedback, CI helps developers identify and address bugs more efficiently.
Over time, CI became a cornerstone of modern software development, setting the stage for the evolution of more advanced DevOps practices like Continuous Deployment (CD).
Emergence of Continuous Delivery
Continuous Delivery (CD) evolved as an extension of Continuous Integration (CI) to further streamline the software release process. While CI focuses on integrating code changes and automated testing, CD is the ability to safely and quickly get changes of all types into production.
CD aims to make deployments predictable and reliable, reducing the risks associated with releasing new software. By automating the entire release process, CD allows teams to deliver updates more frequently and confidently without sacrificing stability and reliability. This practice has become essential for organizations striving for agility and rapid innovation.
Modern Application Delivery Challenges
Complexity of Cloud Native Workflows
As organizations adopt cloud-native architectures, their CI/CD pipelines become more complex. Microservices, containerization, and dynamic orchestration add layers of intricacy that traditional CI/CD tools struggle to manage. Each microservice may have its own lifecycle, dependencies, and deployment requirements, leading to a maze of branching pipelines.
This complexity can result in longer development cycles and increased risk of errors. Additionally, maintaining consistency across different environments—such as development, staging, and production—becomes more challenging. These issues necessitate a more advanced approach to pipeline management, one that can handle the dynamic and distributed nature of Kubernetes-based applications.
Continuous Promotion seeks to address these challenges by offering more adaptable and scalable solutions, ensuring smoother deployments in this intricate landscape.
Organizational and Process-related Pains
Modern organizations face several pain points when holding on to traditional CI/CD and GitOps methodologies.
The rapid pace of software updates can overwhelm existing infrastructure, causing bottlenecks and increasing the risk of downtime. Compliance and security requirements further complicate the deployment pipeline, necessitating manual checks that can delay releases. Lastly, the need for continuous monitoring and quick rollbacks adds another layer of complexity, requiring robust tooling and expertise that many organizations lack.
With all the advantages GitOps gives you, new issues emerge with bespoke CI scripting handling complex promotion processes. Despite implementing GitOps best practices, organizations still struggle with such challenges as:
- Relying on snowflake scripts run in CI workflows to progress releases and configurations from one stage to another.
- Losing track of what version is running, where, and what is safe to deploy.
- Missing a single control plane to view your environments/deploy targets.
- Not being able to easily revise and audit environment progression history.
- Introducing guardrails for developers and providing insights to enable developers to perform self-service promotion.
- Abstracting away the complexity of GitOps principles to empower developers.
All of this demands a new set of best practices that are missing and which we choose to call Continuous Promotion.
The Case for Continuous Promotion
Why Continuous Promotion Matters
Continuous Promotion fills the gaps left by traditional CI/CD and GitOps methodologies by offering a more flexible and scalable approach to modern software deployment.
By continuously promoting code changes through various stages—such as development, staging, and production—based on predefined criteria and automated checks, it ensures that only the stable and tested versions reach production.
This approach reduces the risk of failures and downtime, making deployments more reliable and efficient. Additionally, Continuous Promotion enhances collaboration between development and operations teams by providing a unified framework that aligns with their diverse workflows and priorities. Ultimately, it enables organizations to innovate faster while maintaining high standards of quality and security.
Unique Benefits Added to Traditional CI/CD
Continuous Promotion adds several unique benefits to traditional CI/CD practices.
Firstly, it provides greater flexibility by allowing more granular control over the deployment pipeline. Teams can set specific criteria for promoting code changes through various stages, ensuring that only thoroughly tested and stable versions advance. This reduces the risk of introducing bugs into production environments.
Secondly, Continuous Promotion enhances scalability, making it easier to manage complex, multi-service architectures typical of cloud-native applications. It can handle multiple pipelines running concurrently, each with its own set of rules and dependencies.
Lastly, Continuous Promotion fosters better collaboration between development and operations teams by creating a unified process that accommodates their respective needs and priorities. This holistic approach not only improves deployment efficiency but also boosts overall software quality and reliability, making it an essential component for modern DevOps strategies.
Kargo: Continuous Promotion with Great Developer Experience
We already see multiple tools and companies trying to address the challenges of Continuous Promotion, but let us introduce you to our open-source project, Kargo, which was first introduced to the world by the creators of the Argo Project in September 2023.
As an open-source project, Kargo offers a flexible and scalable framework for managing multi-stage deployment pipelines. It allows teams to define custom promotion criteria and automated checks, ensuring that only the most stable code reaches production.
By integrating seamlessly with existing CI/CD and GitOps tools, Kargo enhances their capabilities without requiring a complete overhaul of current workflows.
Additionally, Kargo provides robust monitoring and rollback mechanisms, allowing for quick recovery in case of failures. This approach not only improves deployment efficiency but also ensures higher reliability and security, making Kargo a valuable asset for any organization looking to modernize its DevOps practices.
Summary
Continuous Promotion aims to solve the above mentioned challenges by providing a declarative approach to promotion and removing the need for custom scripting. This gives organizations better control over their promotion strategies when it comes to GitOps and Kubernetes CI/CD practices.
Continuous Promotion is the final step in the Kubernetes CI/CD maturity model, enabling both the application developers and platform engineers to focus on delivering business value in a reliable and continuous fashion.
Getting started with Kargo is easy. Visit our GitHub repository to explore the documentation, installation guides, and examples. You can also sign up for a free trial of Kargo Enterprise inside the Akuity Platform.
Join our Kargo community of early adopters and experience the future of Continuous Promotion using GitOps with Kargo. We are excited to see how Kargo will empower your teams to achieve faster, more reliable, and more secure deployments.
