Author: Spinnaker Steering Committee (Travis Tomsu, Software Engineer, Google)
The Spinnaker community has grown significantly after launching as an open source project in 2015. The project maintainers increasingly look for ways to help the community better understand how Spinnaker is used, and to help contributors prioritize future improvements.
Today, feature development is guided by industry experts, community discussions, Special Interest Groups (SIGs), and events like the recently held Spinnaker Summit. In August 2019, the community published an RFC, which proposed the tooling that will enable everyone to make data-driven decisions based on product usage across all platforms. We encourage Spinnaker users to continue providing feedback, and to review and comment on the RFC.
Following on from this RFC, the Spinnaker 1.18 release includes an initial implementation of statistics collection capabilities that are used to collect generic deployment and usage information from Spinnaker installations around the world. Before going into the details, here are some important facts to know:
- No personally identifying information (PII) is collected or logged.
- The implementation was reviewed and is approved by the Linux Foundation’s Telemetry Data Collection and Usage Policy.
- All stats collection code is open source and can be found in the Spinnaker stats, Echo, and Kork repos found on GitHub.
- Users can disable statistics collection at any time through a single Halyard command.
- Community members that want to work with the underlying dataset and/or dashboard reports can request and receive full access.
This feature exists in the Spinnaker 1.18 release,but is disabled by default while we finalize testing of the backend and fine-tune report dashboards. The feature will be enabled by default in the Spinnaker 1.19 release (scheduled for March 2020).
All data will be stored in a Google BigQuery database, and report dashboards will be publicly available from the Community Stats page. Community members can request access to the collection data.
Data collected as part of this effort allows the entire community to better monitor the growth of Spinnaker, understand how Spinnaker is used “in the wild”, and prioritize feature development across a large community of Spinnaker contributors. Thank you for supporting Spinnaker and for your help in continuing to make Spinnaker better!
