Keleustes

Keleustes is a Kubernetes-native GitOps delivery control plane for platform teams running many applications across many clusters, environments, regions, and failure domains.

It combines topology-aware application modeling, GitOps reconciliation, release detection, promotion workflows, policy gates, health and diff, and audit history into a single system — rather than splitting that operating model across Argo CD, Kargo, custom CI scripts, and spreadsheets.

The name comes from the Greek κελευστής, the officer on a trireme who set the stroke and cadence for the rowers. Keleustes does not power the change; it directs the cadence of releases across environments, cells, and regions.

What Keleustes replaces

• Argo CD application sync and visibility for supported deployment patterns.
• Kargo-style promotion orchestration.
• Custom CI scripts for environment promotion.
• Spreadsheet-driven deployment tracking.
• Ad hoc Git mutation bots.

What Keleustes does not replace

Git, Kubernetes, Helm, Kustomize, OCI registries, CI systems, observability stacks, admission controllers, or change-management systems of record. Keleustes owns delivery control-plane state and composes with the rest.

Core concepts

• Application — central delivery abstraction tying ownership, sources, manifest config, topology, and status together.
• Source — stream of deployable inputs (container images, Git, OCI artifacts, Helm charts, SBOMs).
• Environment, Cell, DeploymentTarget — ordered lifecycles, failure domains, and concrete targets.
• Release — pinned collection of artifacts for an application, with provenance.
• Promotion and PromotionPolicy — first-class objects for moving a Release into targets, with declared gates and evidence.

Design boundary

Keleustes is opinionated about contracts and unopinionated about vendors. Notifications, signature verification, security scanning, policy gates, and audit forwarding are declarative plugin surfaces — built-in implementations cover the common case, and everything else attaches via webhook. Git is the durable desired-state boundary; cluster mutation outside break-glass is not a sanctioned path.