Armory Forges Ahead With Open Source Contributions to Spinnaker

Having recently joined the Spinnaker community, I’m taking the time to understand how this promising project has evolved from a Netflix-internal tool called Asgard to the leader in the continuous delivery platform space. IMHO (as a super-biased Linux nerd), Spinnaker’s ubiquity has the open source software community to thank. When it comes to enabling fast, safe, repeatable deployments, and blazing a path to cloud native continuous delivery at enterprises, open source is simply the most viable and sustainable option. The adage that “the only thing constant is change” dictates an approach to maintaining a platform which embraces the ecosystem’s evolution; from updates to cloud provider offerings to an ever-growing list of integrations, we need a platform that leverages open source’s power to keep up with the pace, share wins, and have fun doing it!

Armory understands this, and is thus a leader in the Spinnaker open source community. We have become one of the top contributors to the project’s code and documentation. Some of Armory’s key open source stats:

• Member of TOC (Technical Oversight Committee)
• 4 Armory tribals with commit approval status
• SIG Committees: 5
• contributions: 2,000+
• commits: 600+
• core bug fixes: 200+
• core contributors: 13

We dedicate time each day to actively supporting the community in Spinnaker Slack by answering questions and building a knowledge base – please join us! We have also committed to co-leading a number of key SIGs (Special Interest Groups):

• Kubernetes SIG
• AWS SIG
• Security SIG
• Documentation SIG
• Platform SIG

These are open groups which welcome anyone in the community to join, participate, and ask questions. Stop in from anywhere to join Armory in getting engaged with the community and helping guide the future of the project. Armory also organizes Spinnaker meetups across the country, has developed the leading training and educational program for Spinnaker, and has published more than a dozen free ebooks and whitepapers about how to achieve success with Spinnaker.

Beyond community development, Armory is a top-5 contributor to OSS Spinnaker, and has contributed many of the key features since the project was open sourced in late 2015. Diving right into an OSS community like Spinnaker can be daunting, so many of Armory’s contributions focus on paving the way for others to adopt and use Spinnaker to transform software delivery at their organizations.

Some of my favorite of Armory’s Spinnaker contributions include the Plugins Framework, which allows users to add functionality at boot/runtime without the need to manage the lifecycle of building, testing, and distributing an extension. Another, the Spinnaker Operator, allows administrators to manage Spinnaker with kubectl, or other Kubernetes tools that they’re comfortable with. Finally, the Terraform Provider provides the capability to manage Spinnaker applications and pipelines using Hashicorp’s Terraform, another ubiquitous tool in the cloud native universe enabled by immutable infrastructure.

Here’s a more complete list of Armory’s key feature contributions:

• Spinnaker Operator: A Kubernetes operator to deploy and manage Spinnaker with the tools you are used to
• Spinnaker Plug-ins Framework: Create and use plug-ins for the Spinnaker ecosystem
• Spinnaker Terraform Provider: Manage Spinnaker applications and pipelines with Terraform
• Spinnaker Kustomize Integration: Use Kustomize to generate a custom manifest, which can be deployed in a downstream Spinnaker Deploy (Manifest) stage
• Kayenta Integrations for New Relic and Datadog: Use metrics from new Relic and Datadog to drive Automated Canary Analysis
• Spinnaker Kubernetes V2 Provider: Spinnaker support for the Kubernetes V2 provider
• Spinnaker Secrets Management: Encrypt secrets used within your Spinnaker configuration files
• Spinnaker Dynamic Account Configuration: Load configurations from a remote source and dynamically refresh that configuration without restarting Clouddriver
• Spinnaker Kubernetes Run Job Stage: Execute a Kubernetes Job as a part of your pipeline
• Spinnaker Sumo Logic Integration: Use Sumo Logic to turn your Spinnaker data into powerful dashboards

Click here for details on Armory’s 600+ merged PRs.

Armory has invested heavily in making Spinnaker the most usable, extensible, and powerful continuous delivery platform on the planet. We invite you to join us in contributing to the project that will change software delivery forever!