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Descartes Labs – Implementation of Spinnaker Pipelines – The End of Waterfall

By February 24, 2020November 1st, 2023Blog, Community

By Tracy Ragan, CEO DeployHub, CD Foundation Board Member

The New Mexico CI/CD CDF Meetup, hosted by DeployHub, enjoyed an amazing presentation by Louis Vernon, Site Reliability Engineer at Descartes Labs.  Louis showed in detail how Descartes Labs improved service levels to customers, dumped a waterfall release approach and simplified their GKE releases using Spinnaker, Istio and StackDriver. 

Louis’ presentation covers how the team at Descartes Lab implemented Spinnaker to push continuous deployments including the integration of Istio to route updates between Dev, Beta, Pre-Release, and Release, all running in the same cluster.

The use of both Istio and Spinnaker at Descartes Labs is a mature example of what can be done to build out a modern Kubernetes Pipeline.

While Descartes Labs still implements different ‘states’ of the pipeline, the release process uses a single cluster with Istio properly routing using virtual service names.

Louis explains how the team at Descartes Labs got to the point where they understood that a shift of this magnitude was essential for creating a stable environment for all users. 

In my humble opinion, moving away from separate Dev, Test and Prod clusters is the direction we will all be moving. 


The full recorded demo is here:

Louis also presented at the Spinnaker Summit 2019. You can download his presentation at:

https://github.com/louisvernon/SpinnakerSummit2019