Spinnaker for Continuous Delivery in AWS

We have been using Spinnaker for a little over 1 year to practice Continuous Delivery ( CD ) in AWS and also for restacking of AWS ec2's with new AMI's.

Recently I was contacted by TrustRadius - a community of professionals sharing software reviews, and best practices to write a technical review on this tool. Sharing my insights here too , hope you find it useful.

Pros and Cons:

·     Spinnaker is very strong in its ability to baking of AMI(with ROSCO) and code deployments for Linux based ec2/AMI. Below are some more points:

·     Out of the box deployment strategies.

·     Open Source and active development.

·     Multi cloud deployments ( also can integrate with kubernetes)

·     Automated triggers.

·     Manual Judgements.

·     In-house bakery service, which helps in immutable deployments.

·     Easy pipeline setups using the UI , no need to write complex CFNs for code deployments.

·     "One click resize" of the underlying ec2s.

·     Exactly "one click rollback"

·     Pipelines can be scripted (SPEL)

·     Excellent search feature to search LBs , clusters etc from the UI

·     Both high level and low level view of clusters, which has fine-grained options to control cloud infra from Spinnaker UI itself.

·     SSO and RBAC supported.

·     Wide range of deployment strategies like Blue-Green , Highlanders etc.

·     We also get a centralised view of all pipelines in single place. This helps for a large enterprise. Maven is very popular, so generating RPM from existing POM.xml is cool!

Opportunity areas for Spinnaker:

·     It does NOT support CFN based deployments

·     Windows based systems finds it difficult to onboard to Spinnaker.

·     Pipeline level access authorisation is not there.

·     Support for EBS volume encryption is probably missing.

·     Attach/detach EBS volumes during deployments is difficult.

·     No support to deploy the artifacts without re-creating the servers. Only pure immutable deployment are allowed.

·     Open-source - so good and bad!

·     Spinnaker on its own has 10 underlying micro services. Managing Spinnaker needs a focussed platform approach.

·     User authentication is easy but authorisation management is not straight forward.

Return on Investment:

·     It's open source!

·     RPM based deployments can be scripted at Maven file itself , so very easy!

·     RPM based deployments bundles all code and configs together, so awesome!

Other Software Used:

          AWS CodePipeline

Likelihood to Recommend: Very Likely!  👍