The News
At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2026, Akuity highlighted a strong 2025, surpassing 100 customers, reaching 43 million deployments, and posting 150% growth in new annual recurring revenue. The company also used the event to sharpen its message around Cargo, continuous promotion, and AI-assisted delivery operations, arguing that speed alone is no longer enough unless teams can ship reliably across increasingly complex environments.
Analysis
GitOps Growth Meets a Promotion Problem
Akuity’s update lands at a moment when cloud-native development is moving faster than many delivery pipelines can safely support. Our 2025 AppDev research shows that 76.8% of organizations are already using GitOps, 76.8% are integrating infrastructure as code into pipelines, and 89.6% are using AI-based developer tools, while 46.5% say applications must be deployed 50% to 100% faster than just three years ago. That combination matters. AI is accelerating code creation, but it is also exposing a stubborn delivery gap between building software and promoting it consistently across environments.
That gap was one of the clearest themes in the Akuity briefing. Taylor Dolezal described the issue bluntly: “the part that glues together things people are building with where they’re putting it is completely hand rolled,” adding that in many cases “it’s basically like we’re back in the mid two thousands in terms of operations.” That observation gets at an uncomfortable truth in the application development market. Modern teams may have Kubernetes, GitOps, IaC, observability, and AI-assisted coding in place, but the logic for promotion, approvals, and cross-environment coordination often remains fragmented, brittle, or overly manual.
Akuity Pushes Continuous Promotion Beyond Kubernetes
This is where Akuity is trying to separate itself. The company’s broader platform story is still rooted in Argo and GitOps credibility, but the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2026 message focused much more heavily on Cargo and the operational layer around continuous promotion. In the briefing, the team said they were seeing “such an increase in awareness and demand for Cargo,” alongside milestones including 100 customers and 130% net revenue retention . More important than the growth numbers, though, is what they suggest about demand: enterprises appear to be looking for a more structured way to govern promotions across Kubernetes, Terraform, and other targets without rebuilding everything around a new toolchain.
The custom steps launch is especially notable in that context. Akuity said, “we’re going to be launching custom steps at KubeCon EU,” positioning it as a way for enterprises to extend Cargo with containerized logic that fits their own internal audit tools, approvals, and workflow dependencies. That matters because developers and platform teams rarely want a rigid framework that forces them to abandon the tooling and controls they already trust. As discussed in the briefing, the model is meant to “plug it in, use your existing approval processes,” rather than introduce a separate governance path. For the broader market, that makes Akuity’s approach less about replacing delivery systems and more about standardizing the messy middle between commit and production.
Market Challenges and Insights
Developers have been dealing with these business challenges for years, but usually through a patchwork of scripts, tickets, and internal conventions. Even now, teams often manage environment promotion with a mix of Git workflows, manual manifest updates, approval handoffs, and homegrown orchestration. That approach can work for a while, especially in smaller or less regulated environments, but it becomes harder to sustain as the number of applications, environments, and stakeholders rises. The briefing included examples from large enterprises where Cargo replaced bespoke scripting and improved visibility into what had changed, what was promoted, and what failed along the way.
That pattern aligns with what we are hearing across the market. Faster delivery cycles increase risk: 41.3% of respondents say accelerated CI/CD raises vulnerability exposure, and 35.9% say developers are not fully comfortable taking on more security responsibility because they fear breaking production. At the same time, 60.5% of organizations say real-time insights are a top observability priority, and 51.3% prioritize tracing and fault isolation to speed root cause analysis. In other words, the challenge is no longer just automating delivery. It is making delivery observable, governable, and resilient enough to support AI-era application velocity.
Why This Could Change How Developers Handle Delivery Going Forward
Looking ahead, Akuity’s roadmap suggests that continuous promotion may evolve into more of a control plane for delivery decisions, not just a workflow engine. The company emphasized that “it is still the human in the loop that’s taking action and fixing things,” but that the longer-term goal is to move from roughly “20% kind of AI assisted to really being 80% AI driven” through better guardrails and AI-initiated actions. That is a meaningful directional signal for platform engineering and developer teams. It suggests a future where delivery automation does not simply execute scripts faster, but increasingly helps detect, diagnose, and potentially remediate issues within defined policy boundaries.
The key point is that this will likely matter only if it fits real developer workflows. One of the more grounded moments in the conversation came when Paul Nashawaty observed that “AI is a tool to make the thing,” not the thing itself. That framing is useful here. Akuity’s opportunity is not just to market AI into GitOps, but to make promotion, approvals, and incident response less manual without forcing developers into yet another disconnected operational surface. Features such as Slack-based incident resolution and custom steps appear designed with that practical adoption problem in mind. For developers, that could mean a more flexible path to standardization. For the market, it signals that GitOps platforms may increasingly compete on how well they unify automation, policy, and operational intelligence rather than on deployment mechanics alone.
Looking Ahead
The application development market is moving into a phase where shipping software is no longer just about generating more code or automating more pipeline stages. The real differentiation is shifting toward how well organizations can coordinate promotions, controls, and remediation across increasingly heterogeneous environments. As AI raises code volume and compresses release expectations, the pressure on delivery systems will keep increasing.
Akuity’s message at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2026 suggests the company sees that shift clearly. Its growth metrics point to rising market demand, but the more important takeaway is strategic: continuous promotion is becoming a more central requirement in platform engineering, especially where developers need to move fast without losing visibility or governance. If Akuity can keep extending Cargo and Akuity Intelligence in ways that stay GitOps-native and workflow-friendly, it may help shape how enterprise teams think about software delivery in the AI era.
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