Why Spinnaker Matters to CI/CD

It takes many tools to deliver an artifact into production. Tools for building and testing, tools for creating a deployable artifact like a container image, tools for authentication and authorization, tools for maintaining infrastructure, and more. Seamlessly integrating these tools into a workflow can be transformative for an engineering culture, but doing it yourself can be a tall order.

As organizations mature, both the number of tools and the number of people managing them tend to grow, often leading to confusing complexity and fragmentation. A bespoke continuous delivery (CD) process may work at a smaller scale, but it becomes increasingly challenging to maintain and understand. It can take a long time for new engineers to discover and sort through all the tools needed to deploy even the simplest of changes.

Spinnakerwas created to address this issue. It is a generalizable and extensible tool that provides users with the building blocks to create tailor-made continuous delivery pipelines. There is no need to spend time and take on increased risk inventing your own approach when you can instead use a solution that is already trusted and developed by major companies like Netflix and Google for handling the delivery of thousands of applications.

Netflix used to have a fragmented continuous delivery story. Each organization’s delivery system was built specifically for that org, so others were often unable to benefit from that work. Teams considered themselves unique and wove together Jenkins jobs with Asgard.

All of this duplicated effort was not only wasteful but also made it difficult to keep teams savvy and up-to-date with the latest delivery best practices.

Source: opensource.com