Speaking with TFiR, Hong Wang of Akuity defined the current state of GitOps adoption and explained why multi-environment promotion is the next frontier for enterprise platform teams.

What Is Argo CD and Why Did It Reach 60% Adoption?

Wang co-created Argo CD ten years ago at Intuit to solve a practical deployment problem: thousands of engineers needed to deploy applications to Kubernetes clusters without deep Kubernetes expertise. The solution was GitOps—treating configuration as source code stored in Git repositories. Instead of clicking deploy buttons, engineers write YAML configuration files, and Argo CD continuously syncs those configurations to clusters.

Hong Wang: “We created the open source project to solve a very practical problem as a GitOps solution for deploying to Kubernetes clusters at Intuit. As the community grew larger, more enterprise customers came to us, saying, ‘We want you to help us because we want to replicate the Intuit experience at scale to manage many clusters.’ That’s why we decided there was a business opportunity. We created a company called Akuity to provide an enterprise software delivery platform for everyone.”

According to CNCF surveys, Argo CD reached 60% adoption across all Kubernetes clusters by 2025, making it the clear winner for GitOps deployment automation. The company Akuity, founded five years ago, now manages over 100 customers and has processed 43 million deployments.

Broader Context: The Multi-Environment Promotion Gap

While Argo CD solved single-environment deployment at scale, enterprises operating production infrastructure face a different challenge: orchestrating promotions across dev, staging, and production environments with proper governance. Akuity introduced Kargo two years ago to address this gap, and adoption has accelerated rapidly.

Hong Wang: “Argo CD is focused on single-environment deployment. It doesn’t address multiple environments—how they’re promoted and orchestrated together. Kargo is focused on orchestration. If you deploy something to dev, how do you move the same thing to staging and then into production? Kargo is doing that. And now we’re also supporting not just Kubernetes—we’re also supporting Terraform, VMs, and serverless. We’re providing a more generic promotion engine for people to manage their infrastructure.”

Wang noted that at KubeCon Europe 2026, attendees consistently mentioned they’re actively using Kargo for multi-environment workflows. The focus on controlled rollouts with governance resonates with enterprises scaling cloud-native delivery pipelines beyond basic deployment automation.

Wang also explained the broader GitOps concept and why it became the dominant Kubernetes deployment pattern: “You have thousands of engineers who don’t know about Kubernetes at all. What’s the best way to let them be exposed to Kubernetes, learn about the concepts in the proper way, and also be able to deploy to clusters in a very reliable manner? The concept that came out from the community is actually called GitOps. Basically, you treat the configuration as Git-like source code. Every time you want to deploy something, you’re not clicking a button—you’re actually writing YAML like source code. Then there’s automation that takes the source code YAML, deploys it to the cluster, and does reconciliation continuously.”

The company’s evolution from Argo CD to Kargo reflects the maturation of GitOps from a deployment tool into a full infrastructure orchestration platform. By extending support beyond Kubernetes to Terraform, VMs, and serverless environments, Akuity is positioning Kargo as a universal promotion engine for hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure delivery.

Watch the full TFiR interview with Hong Wang here.