Akuity: Argo CD, Kargo and agents

Daniel Hoang works at Akuity, whose team built Argo CD. Luca Berton talked to him at AGNTCon + MCPCon North America 2026 in San Jose on 22 October 2026 and asked him about Argo CD, Akuity, and what either has to do with agents.

Where Argo CD came from

When Kubernetes first came out, teams that had to deploy at scale, for many teams, had few standard ways to do it. People scripted their own deployments, and nothing really helped them see what was running or understand what had gone wrong.

Argo CD changed that with a developer experience built on GitOps. People could see how their applications were deployed to Kubernetes and what had reached their environments, and when something went wrong, the tool could remediate the changes.

Kargo: the steps built in

Implementing Argo CD can still be hard, Daniel says: “You have to script how you’re doing all of this.” Akuity’s answer is Kargo, which bridges that gap. Instead of scripts that update the GitOps pipelines, it has all the steps built in, a UI that shows what is deployed where, and gates on deployments from one environment to the next.

An agentic control plane, through MCP

Tools like these still have to be adopted, and people still have to build the pipelines themselves, which can be hard. Today many people prefer AI as their front end: they prompt an assistant and ask it to build things. That is why Akuity came to AGNTCon. It has built what Daniel calls “an agentic control plane layer” on MCP, which gates the agent’s permissions.

With Akuity’s MCP tool plugged into an assistant such as Claude or Copilot, a user can ask it to build a Kargo pipeline that follows best practice, from what is already in their Git repositories. To troubleshoot, they can ask which applications are degraded across all their environments, and get to the root cause. Development, staging and production in one place, Luca summed up. “That’s right.”

Open source first

Argo CD and Kargo are both open source projects, so anyone can try them for free. The layers on top, MCP and agents, are part of Akuity Enterprise: you talk to the team and start a trial.

Luca asked what to call all this. AI GitOps? Daniel’s choice: “Software delivery with Akuity.”

More

The episode with Daniel Hoang is being produced and goes out on YouTube first. The day it was recorded: AGNTCon + MCPCon North America 2026: day one.