Using Spinnaker with Kubernetes for Continuous Delivery

In this era of fast-paced technology, more and more organizations and teams are moving towards agile practices with rapidly evolving software development lifecycles. With that, Continuous Delivery (CD) has become a major part of the DevOps process, where the whole software release process is automated—the build, the testing, the deployment.

With the popularity of Kubernetes for developing containerized applications, the need is growing for a reliable continuous delivery platform with native support for deployments on Kubernetes clusters.

In this article, we will explore Spinnaker, one tool that facilitates integrating Kubernetes into a CD pipeline.

(This article is part of our Kubernetes Guide. Use the right-hand menu to navigate.)

What is Spinnaker?

Spinnaker is an open-source continuous delivery platform targeted at multi-cloud deployments. Initially developed by Netflix as a successor for their internal Asgard platform, Spinnaker has now evolved into a standalone continuous delivery platform.

Spinnaker provides the necessary tools to manage your code from commit to multi-cloud delivery with its powerful abstraction layer.

(Read our comprehensive Spinnaker introduction.)

Spinnaker features

Let’s look at Spinnaker’s key features.

Multi-cloud deployment

Spinnaker natively supports deploying applications in multiple cloud providers. It supports cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud, Cloud Foundry, and OpenStack.

CI integrations

Spinnaker’s robust and automated release pipelines can be easily integrated with other tools such as:

• Jenkins
• Travis CI
• Git event
• CRON jobs

This allows developers to effectively carry out various tasks from artifact collection to pipeline triggering.

Monitoring & notification integrations

Spinnaker can be easily integrated with monitoring solutions such as Datadog, Prometheus, SignalFx, and Stackdriver for metrics collection and analysis.

Additionally, you can configure Spinnaker to work with services such as Slack, HipChat, SMS to provide notifications.

Support for different deployment strategies

Spinnaker includes built-in deployment strategies like highlander, canary, and red/black and can be easily configured to adapt to any custom deployment strategy.

Additionally, Spinnaker’s ability to create and deploy immutable images allows developers to:

• Deploy faster with easier rollbacks
• Handle config drift issues much more effectively.

Baked-in security practices

Spinnaker comes with strong security features such as built-in role-based access control with support for multiple authentication mechanisms, including Oauth, LDAP, X.509 certs, Azure Groups, etc. Moreover, it allows convenient isolation of projects for maximum security.

Other features of Spinnaker, such as manual judgments and chaos monkey integrations, enable developers to review and test the deployments for instance failures before releasing them.