Agentic Control Plane
The Agentic Control Plane is the governance layer through which AI agents, such as Claude, Codex or Cursor, and custom-built agents, read state from and take action on Argo CD, Kargo, and the Akuity Platform. Every agent action goes through one authenticated, RBAC-scoped interface with an audit trail, instead of a raw kubeconfig or a shared per-engineer credential.
The Agentic Control Plane spans three jobs: Deploy, Promote, and Operate. These are the same jobs a platform engineer already performs manually on the Akuity Platform, now reachable by an external agent through the Akuity MCP Server, with every request passing through one governed interface instead of direct cluster access.
Some examples:
- A platform engineer asks an agent what's deployed to production for a given service, and whether it's healthy, without opening the Argo CD UI.
- A developer, working from Claude or Cursor, asks an agent to promote a build through Kargo from staging to production. The agent inherits the developer's Kargo permissions, and the promotion still runs through any approval gate configured on that pipeline.
- An on-call engineer asks an agent to investigate a degraded service. The agent correlates logs, metrics, and events into one timeline and, if a runbook covers that failure mode, follows it.
- A platform team asks an agent which clusters across the organization are running a given image version.
An agent never gets a broader grant than the person it's acting for. It inherits that person's role and is further limited by the organization's guardrail level.
How it works
The Agentic Control Plane is accessed through the Akuity MCP Server, an MCP (Model Context Protocol) endpoint that exposes Argo CD, Kargo, the Akuity Platform, and Akuity Agents capabilities as structured tools an agent can call directly, instead of screen-scraping the UI or calling the Kubernetes API on its own.
There are two ways to connect.
- The platform endpoint (
https://akuity.cloud/mcp, orhttps://eu.akuity.cloud/mcpfor EU organizations) is for Akuity Platform users and automation: it authenticates with an organization role or a scoped API key and reaches organization resources, fleet insights, and every MCP-enabled Argo CD or Kargo instance the caller can access. - The direct endpoint (
https://<ARGO_CD_HOSTNAME>/mcporhttps://<KARGO_HOSTNAME>/mcp) is for a user authenticating with one Argo CD or Kargo instance directly, using that instance's existing SSO, login, or native token and RBAC, and is scoped to just that instance.
Neither endpoint grants more access than the caller already has: the platform endpoint only adds organization and fleet level reach, and what an agent can actually call is capped further by the org's guardrail level and the governance controls below.
A request moves through the control plane in four steps:
- The agent authenticates as the person it's acting on behalf of, or with an API key.
- The request is checked against that person's RBAC and the org's guardrail level.
- The action runs, or is refused.
- The change is written to the audit trail, attributed to the person the agent acted for.
Governance Controls
Before an agent can act, every request clears a series of governance controls. These are the controls shipped as part of the Agentic Control Plane:
| # | Control | What it governs | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Identity | Whose action this is: a person, or an agent acting on their behalf. | A promotion request carries the engineer's identity and is recognizable as coming from an agent. |
| 2 | RBAC | What that person, and therefore the agent, is allowed to touch at all. | The engineer holds the promote role on this pipeline, so the agent inherits it. No role means the request is refused before it reaches the system; there's no fallback to an admin credential. |
| 3 | Guardrail level | Whether the agent channel itself can make changes, independent of what the person could do by hand. | An org can set the guardrail level to read-only: the agent can see everything the engineer can, but any change it attempts, even one the engineer is permitted to make, is rejected outright. |
| 4 | Agentic-aware Audit Trail | Whether the log records that an agent acted, and on whose behalf. | A promotion made through an agent appears in the audit log as the engineer's action, and the entry shows that an agent carried it out. |
See Governance Controls for how to configure them.