The Pulumi Kubernetes Operator (PKO) allows users to manage Pulumi stacks as Kubernetes resources, but lacks robust change management features. Kargo addresses this by providing a structured approach to promoting changes through different environments, which is particularly valuable for platform teams needing to balance speed and governance as their operations scale. The integration of Kargo with PKO enables controlled releases, visual deployment tracking, automatic verification, and clear change auditing. Kargo functions as a continuous promotion platform, organizing changes into freight, stages, and promotions. Freight consists of the packaged artifacts, typically a Pulumi program and its latest Git commit. Stages represent different lifecycle phases like dev, staging, and production, while promotions move freight through these stages. Kargo monitors Git repositories for changes and updates the corresponding PKO Stack resources, triggering deployments through PKO and Pulumi. An example architecture illustrates how Kargo, PKO, and Argo CD work together. Kargo detects new infrastructure code, updates manifests, and Argo CD syncs these changes to Kubernetes. PKO then triggers the actual deployment, followed by Kargo verifying the success of the deployment. The Kargo dashboard enhances visibility into the promotion process, showing which versions of infrastructure code are active in different environments and providing real-time health information. Setting up Kargo involves creating a project, configuring Git credentials, and setting up approval roles. Users can define promotion policies through ProjectConfig resources, allowing for automatic promotion in certain stages while requiring manual approval in others. Kargo also requires access to Pulumi’s API for verifying deployment success, which can be set up easily through its UI.