Why You Should Use Spinnaker ?

Deploy your code with high velocity and confidence

This story was originally published on Medium and is cross-posted here for a wider audience.

I believe most tech giants want to build high-performance, secure, automated, and scalable applications. To make it possible that, it require writing clean and efficient code, and also considering time and space complexity, optimizing system design, and managing the deployment process with reliability and efficiency.

I am not going to teach you CI/CD and Spinnaker, but I want to give you some benefits of using Spinnaker for large-enterprise applications.

Before giving great benefits of Spinnaker I want to give short heads up for CI/CD process, you can read for more about CI/CD process.

What is CI/CD ?

Basically once your code merged into the main/master branch on a Git platform like GitHub or Bitbucket, Jenkins/GitHub Actions/CircleC/GitLab CI/CD automatically pulls the latest changes, builds the application, and runs tests in the QA environment. Once all checks pass, Spinnaker seamlessly picks up the pipeline and orchestrates a secure, reliable deployment to production.

What is Spinnaker ?

Spinnaker is an open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform for releasing software changes with high velocity and confidence.

Created at Netflix, it has been battle-tested in production by hundreds of teams over millions of deployments. It combines a powerful and flexible pipeline management system with integrations to the major cloud providers.

Supported With Major Cloud Providers

Giant Companies Powered By Spinnaker

Why should use Spinnaker?

• Spinnaker provides application management and deployment

• Help you release software changes with high velocity and confidence

• Spinnaker is an open-source

• Multi-cloud continuous delivery platform

• Combines a powerful and flexible pipeline management system

• It has integrations to the major cloud providers

• To standardize your release processes and improve quality

Best Features of Spinnaker

→ Role-based Access Control : Restrict access to projects or accounts by hooking into your internal authentication system

→ Restricted Execution Windows : Restrict the execution of stages to certain windows of time, making sure deployments happen during off-peak traffic or when the right people are on hand to monitor the roll-out.

→ CI Integrations : Listen to events, collect artifacts, and trigger pipelines from Jenkins or Travis CI. Triggers via git, cron, or a new image in a docker registry are also supported.

→ CLI for Setup and Admin : Install, configure, and update your Spinnaker instance with halyard, Spinnaker’s CLI tool.

→ Deployment Strategies : Configure pipelines with built-in deployment strategies such as highlander and blue/green, with rolling blue/green and canary in active development, or define your own custom strategy.

→ Manual Judgments : Require a manual approval prior to releasing an update with a manual judgement stage.

→ Monitoring Integrations : Tie your releases to monitoring services Datadog, Prometheus, Stackdriver, SignalFx, or New Relic using their metrics for canary analysis.

Pro Tip Do not make configuration changes directly from the Spinnaker UI. Instead of that always define and manage your deployment logic through version-controlled YAML files in your EKS or ECS infrastructure repositories. This will give you traceability, consistency, and better collaboration across teams.

Conclusion

Using Spinnaker for large and complex projects adds scalability, security, and consistency across all environments. Its powerful features and cloud-native integrations make it an ideal solution for teams to deliver software with velocity and confidence.

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