Exclusive: Akuity adds Fleet Management to Kargo Enterprise to replace per-cluster pipelines

Akuity Inc., a software delivery platform company, has introduced Fleet Management to its Kargo Enterprise platform. This new feature enables teams to release changes across hundreds of Kubernetes clusters as a single release, replacing the existing per-cluster pipelines. Akuity claims that the rise in infrastructure, fueled by AI, has led to the creation of fleets of clusters, which introduces release risk and slows down delivery.

With Fleet Management, teams can group their clusters into a fleet and define the rollout order and failure threshold once. Kargo then promotes each change through the fleet wave by wave, monitoring the health of each cluster along the way. The rollout halts only if the failure rate surpasses the predetermined threshold set by the team, preventing one failed cluster from stopping the entire fleet.

Changes start with a pilot group and canary clusters before reaching the general population, with a health check in place between each wave. If a bad change is identified during a rollout, it is halted for the entire fleet, and the rollback impacts every cluster simultaneously. Akuity expects this change to reduce the time changes spend waiting on release windows and cluster-by-cluster sign-offs.

The company provides an example where a patch for a known vulnerability in an add-on like cert-manager would stop in the first wave, preventing it from reaching the rest of the clusters. Akuity, a venture capital-backed startup, was founded in 2021 by the creators of Argo CD, with Lead Edge Capital leading its $20 million Series A round in 2022. Fleet Management is currently in private beta, with no specific date for general availability.