Akuity Expands GitOps Environment Promotion for Platform and Security Teams With Custom Steps

SUNNYVALE, Calif., March 31, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Akuity, the provider of the leading software delivery platform built by the creators of Argo CD and Kargo, today 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.

Today’s announcement comes on the heels of Akuity celebrating 5 years of growth with record 2025 results, surpassing 100 customers and 43 million deployments fueled by AI demand: https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/03/19/3259247/0/en/GitOps-Leader-Akuity-Celebrates-5-Years-of-Growth-with-Record-2025-Results-Surpassing-100-Customers-and-43-Million-Deployments-Fueled-by-AI-Demand.html.

“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.

About Akuity
Akuity is the provider of the leading software delivery platform for enterprise-ready delivery, continuous promotion and AI-powered intelligence for industry leaders. Akuity was founded by the original creators of Argo CD and Kargo; the team has experience running tens of thousands of applications at scale with multi-billion dollar impact. Akuity is based in Sunnyvale, CA. For more information, go to: https://akuity.io/.

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