Keptn 0.10: Cloud-Native Application Lifecycle

Introduction

Shipping to Kubernetes is easy; shipping safely — with repeatable verification and automated rollback — is the hard part. Teams often end up with a patchwork of scripts and CI stages that don’t consistently answer the SRE question: “Did this change make the service better or worse?”

Keptn 0.10, released on October 25, 2020, is focused on that gap. By combining deployment orchestration, quality gates, and observability signals, Keptn aims to make progressive delivery less about heroics and more about reliable, automated decisions.

What Keptn is for

• Automating promotion between stages based on objective signals (SLOs/metrics), not just “tests passed”.
• Standardizing rollouts across teams so canary/blue-green patterns don’t get re-invented service by service.
• Closing the loop between deployments and observability, so rollback/remediation can be triggered predictably.

Deployment Automation

• Multi-stage deployments enable complex deployment pipelines with approval gates.
• Canary deployments provide gradual rollout with automatic rollback on failure.
• Blue-green deployments enable zero-downtime deployments with instant rollback.
• Automated testing integration enables running tests as part of deployment pipelines.

Quality Gates

1. SLO-based evaluation enables quality gates based on service level objectives.
2. Multi-metric support allows evaluating multiple metrics simultaneously.
3. Custom metrics integration enables using any Prometheus metric for quality evaluation.
4. Automatic remediation provides automatic rollback when quality gates fail.

Observability Integration

• Prometheus integration provides metrics-based quality evaluation.
• Distributed tracing support enables evaluating quality based on trace data.
• Log analysis integration enables quality evaluation based on log patterns.
• Dashboard improvements provide better visibility into deployment status.

Getting Started

keptn install --platform=kubernetes
keptn create project my-project --shipyard=shipyard.yaml

Summary

Keptn 0.10 continues to evolve as a platform for managing application lifecycles on Kubernetes, providing teams with automated deployment and quality assurance capabilities.