Akuity introduced Custom Steps in its platform. Custom Steps is a container-based extensibility model that provides platform and security teams with a native way to define promotion logic directly in Kargo.
“With Custom Steps, platform and security teams can define org-specific environment promotion logic. They can integrate with third-party tools, gain complete visibility into their promotion pipelines and ensure built-in governance and compliance through comprehensive audit trails. This expansion is a natural step to streamline continuous application delivery and remove any manual intervention or duct-tape tooling,” said Hong Wang, co-founder and CEO of Akuity.
Kargo is a GitOps-native continuous environment promotion tool that automates moving changes through environments — dev to staging to production — by orchestrating a sequence of promotion steps that update Git, render manifests and sync Argo CD applications.
Custom Steps is a major expansion of Kargo’s capabilities in the Akuity platform. It is a container-based interface that enables Kargo to natively execute any promotion logic. It is packaged as OCI images and registered cluster-wide by a Kargo admin. Once registered, any team in the cluster can reference a custom step by name in their promotion templates. Each step runs in a Kubernetes Pod at execution time, with its inputs, outputs and result recorded in the Kargo promotion record alongside every other step in the sequence.
Custom Steps offers a wide range of benefits for platform teams, including:
- Integration with existing tools: teams can now bring internal and third-party tools, such as Ansible and OPA, into the environment promotion sequence without requiring Kargo to natively support them. Users can also reuse existing scripts and tooling without rewriting them.
- Build once, use everywhere: Custom Steps are registered at the system level, making them usable by application and platform teams across the organization. This means that there is no duplication of logic across teams.
- Flexible: As with built-in steps, Custom Steps can be inserted anywhere in the promotion sequence – before, during or after core GitOps operations. Furthermore, conditional logic, dynamic outputs and environment-specific behavior can all be scripted.
- Auditability and compliance: Every step in the promotion sequence is version-controlled, traceable and observable in one place. Org-specific compliance requirements (audit logs, change tickets, evidence records) become part of the environment promotion contract rather than a separate manual process.
