Spinnaker 1.0 Launched

Jun 9, 2017 by Armory

We’re happy to share that Netflix, Google, and the rest of the Spinnaker community has successfully released Spinnaker 1.0. Here’s more detail on what this means for the OSS Spinnaker project and for Armory customers, as well as a look back at the journey to improve cloud-first deployments with the tool that’s made this all possible.

Below are some milestones and achievements that we would like to share:

November 16, 2015: Netflix announces that Spinnaker was available on GitHub.

Nov 3, 2016: Target and Veritas announce support for OpenStack

Mar 10, 2017: Google and Waze presentation on multi-cloud deployments at Google Next

May 2, 2017: Armory announces RPM Support for Spinnaker.

June 6, 2017: Spinnaker released version 1.0.

What does 1.0 mean for OSS Spinnaker, and for Armory customers?

This is something that’s been in the works for nearly a year with active participation from the entire Spinnaker community as well as Armory. The fact that Google is announcing the 1.0 launch of a Netflix OSS project is significant — it shows the high level of commitment Google Cloud Platform has for Spinnaker.

Additionally, Google is announcing Halyard along with the 1.0 launch. Halyard is an open-source command line interface (CLI) tool that makes it easy to deploy Spinnaker itself. Here’s why Halyard is a big step forward for OSS Spinnaker:

Halyard availability means that it’ll be much easier for the OSS community to install and upgrade Spinnaker. Halyard provides support for Kubernetes and beta support for GCE users. For AWS users, Armory provides an installer to enable fifteen minute installs of Spinnaker using a simple bash command.

What have we learned?

As companies move to adopt the cloud and compete to become agile, certain best practices and organizational shifts inevitably rise to the top.

Immutable Infrastructure is a safer way to deploy

All of the best practices are made possible because of immutable infrastructure. By avoiding configuration drift and mutated code though redeployments throughout your servers whenever a change occurs, developers are able to employ deployment strategies blue/green deployments, canaries, and multi-staging environments in a confident manner. Rollbacks are also far easier to implement due to immutable infrastructure. In the future, we might even begin to call configuration drift and mutated code as deployment debt.

Multi-cloud deployments IS your back-up plan

Organizations will have to prepare for problems that will arise through multi-region deployments and multi-cloud deployments. Deploying in multiple regions ensures a backup plan against region-wide failures; multi-cloud deployments provides a buffer against any attempted vendor lock-ins.

Automation is the future of deployments

Reducing manual steps and reducing the burden of “rote” work on your developers is a key step in becoming efficient. All the metrics showed that when companies adopted Spinnaker we not only enabled the features below while reducing manual steps, but would also reduce outage and downtime.

Intelligent canaries
Blue/green deployments
Multiple-staging environments
Automated pipeline creation
Easy rollbacks

What have we accomplished?

Spinnaker 1.0 includes several new features:

We’ve added RPM Packager support for Spinnaker.

One of the most oft-requested features; RPM Packager support allowed companies that wanted to use Spinnaker to integrate it easily into their existing workflow.

Launching of a new Spinnaker website design.

With a new launch should come a new look as well! We personally think it looks a lot sleeker than the last.

We’ve done heavy documentation work.

All software should come with manuals and Spinnaker is no different. The OSS community has done a wonderful job of documenting Spinnaker, and Armory has released our own documentation as well.

Google has done a wonderful job of integrating Spinnaker with Kubernetes

Kubernetes is a deployment tool that companies are already using; our goal is to add value on top of that through orchestration of deployments to Kubernetes.

The community has made a total of 20,986 commits into the OSS GitHub and the top-level project has 3,088 stars(at the time of this writing).

We’d like to give a warm shout-out to all the developers out there that contribute their work to the OSS community, as well as the companies that back them up:

What’s Next?

Spinnaker is already providing valuable deployment management to companies like Waze, Netflix, Google, and Target to name a few. We expect companies looking to fully integrate with the cloud to see Spinnaker as the valuable tool it is but will prepare for adoption through steady releases of integral features that we know will make Spinnaker a godsend to their development teams.

If your team isn’t already using Spinnaker or is currently looking into deployment management, talk to us! We would like nothing more than to understand how Spinnaker can be a daily tool in your workflow.