Introducing Shipper

Booking.com is proud to announce the first public release of Shipper, an open source project that provides powerful, customizable rollouts to one or manyKubernetes clusters. Shipper uses Helm charts and native Kubernetes concepts to make it easy for anyone to set up blue/green or canary rollouts for their applications. The current release uses vanilla Kubernetes traffic shifting, so you don’t need a service mesh provider to get started.

We intend to add support for other traffic shifting backends like Istio in the coming months. As we adopted Kubernetes at Booking.com in late 2017, we had two major features of our traditional platform that we needed to implement: fast canary rollouts, and easy multi-region redundancy. Kubernetes is a wonderful platform, but it stops short of providing built-in support for the kinds of deployment strategies that fast-moving companies use to mitigate risk in continuous delivery.

These strategies, like canary or blue/green, combine fleet management, traffic shifting, and checkpointing to ensure that user impact from a bad rollout is as limited as possible.

Source: medium.com