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Mar 19
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Introducing our newest CDF Ambassador – Dheeraj Nayal

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Hello CDF Members,

This is Dheeraj Nayal located in India.

I am so excited to engage with all of you members associated with the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) as a newly appointed CDF Ambassador. 

Let me introduce myself to you !

I am currently working full-time as the Global community Ambassador and Region Head of APJ & MEA region at DevOps Institute, which is the world’s fastest and largest growing DevOps professional’s association consisting of vibrant Humans of DevOps community located worldwide.

I hold expertise as an emerging best practices evangelist and in building massive global, social and online communities with the commitment to connect the Humans of DevOps and Modern IT to advance the Skills, Knowledge, Ideas & Learning (SKIL) with ease, sharing and extensive collaboration. I am a frequent Speaker at local and international conferences and also the Core organizer of Global SKILup Day and Chief Evangelist of Ambassador program by DevOps Institute. Some of my public presentations are also available on YouTube for reference.  I am passionate about engaging with various community members & leaders spanned across Industries and domains worldwide.

In 2019, I traversed across the world for various speaking and organizing engagements for the community & Partners with key regions like US, Europe and executed a Asia-Pacific roadshow spanning across India, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia & New Zealand. Some of the glimpses from last year engagements while you can find more on my LinkedIn updates.

I am so excited to associate with CDF as an Ambassador for a variety of reasons. The core values of CDF with an Open-governance and vendor neutral model and providing guidance and resources to foster collaboration and eventually empowering developers, teams to produce and release high quality software is an unprecedented and fantastic initiative.

Since, I have been part of the global communities across multiple domains and regions as a member, facilitator, committee members, organizer – I am enthusiastic to contribute and support the global community of CD Foundation. As a CDF Ambassador, I would like to amplify and resonate the core values of CD Foundation to reach wider audience and networks while building an inclusive community of developers, vendors, Industry Partners, members and end users facilitating sustainable projects that are part of the broad and growing continuous delivery ecosystem.

I would love to engage with each one of you actively across platforms either in your nearby locations or at an upcoming Conferences or meetups or Online summit where I am either participating, speaking or organizing. There is so much to look forward to and so much more to share, learn and advance together as the Humans of CD Foundations. You can find me in some of the upcoming conferences or meetups below which are confirmed and also can connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter with below details.

Twitter : @HumanOfDevOps

LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/dheerajnayal/

Upcoming confirmed events in 2020 where you can find me: 

Mar 18
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Welcome our first cohort of CDF Community Ambassadors!

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By Jacqueline Salinas, CDF Director of Ecosystem & Community Development

Dear CDF Members –

Please welcome the first cohort of CDF Community Ambassadors (CDF CA)! You might be wondering what exactly is a CDF Community Ambassador (CDF CA)? Well, a CA is a passionate volunteer, representative of CDF, and Meetup super host & organizer. The vision of the CA program is to help grow the network of passionate CI/CD communities and connect them through various efforts that the CD Foundation is launching in 2020. The CD Foundation sees these CA’s as the troops on the ground rallying the community together. They are stewards of CI/CD education & best practices for their local community, active open source project contributors, and leaders helping drive awareness of open source projects.

These 13 folks have stepped up and committed to helping grow awareness about the CD Foundation, as well as, help us deploy new Meetup user groups in new locations as an effort to drive more events globally. These CA’s will continue to deliver CI/CD education to their local community and most importantly help recruit new Meetup members. These volunteers are vital to the CI/CD community and to the CD Foundation! Help me give them a warm welcome to the CD Foundation community. To help you get to know our CDF Community Ambassadors better, look for their individual blogs coming in the next few weeks.

Discover your local CI/CD Meetup Group here.

Prefer a more active role? Learn more about what it takes to become a CDF Community Ambassador. Here’s more about what the role of the CDF Community Ambassador entails:

o   The Community Go-To Resource for People Interested in CDF

As a Community Ambassador, you will be an important resource to people interested in the CDF and its corresponding projects. We will provide you with training on how to best represent the CDF and provide discount codes for you to attend CDF-sponsored events.

o   Help Local Users Learn More About CDF

As a Community Ambassador, you will organize and host a local CDF Users Group meetup. The CDF will provide resources to help you set up your meetup and ongoing support such as swag credits and reimbursements for costs associated with running a community event.

o   Represent the Community Publicly

As a Community Ambassador, you will be a public-facing community representative. You can choose the way you are most comfortable representing CDF whether that’s through public speaking or written content such as blogs. We will work with you to find the best fit and provide you with resources to help you be successful as either a speaker, a writer, or both!

Apply here: https://forms.gle/Wo71QJMiBnoGfbLE7

Mar 16
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From Spinnaker – April’s Spinnaker Gardening #CommunityHack is Going Virtual!

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Spinnaker Gardening Days Community Hack

Originally posted on the Armory blog, by Rosalind Benoit

Guess what?! Our Hackathon is going fully online! “Spinnaker Gardening Days #CommunityHack” happens in one month, and we’re gearing up for an international open-source work-from-home extravaganza! Via Zoom, Slack, and Github, we’ll empower you to move the needle on continuous delivery projects. Teams will hack, newcomers will train, and champions will share Spinnaker secrets. Click here to register and get your free tickets for the hackathon, training track, lunchtime learnings, or all three.

 Join other Spinnaker users and companies to learn and let your skills shine at this collaborative event. We’ll address open-source feature requests, extend the ecosystem, and have lots of fun. Thanks to our generous sponsor Salesforce, all logged-in participants will score prizes, premium swag, and lunch on us! Hack through the workday, or check out our noontime lightning talks. Visit the Spinnaker Gardening repository for the schedule and details.

Salesforce logo

The Armory Tribe celebrates the support of Salesforce and, in particular, Edgar Magana, a Spinnaker champion and Cloud Operations Architect. We recently sat down to discuss the Ops SIG, modeling and standardizing Spinnaker, and his ideas for hackathon projects. Read the full article here.

A relative newcomer to the Spinnaker community, but a veteran in matters of cloud computing, networking, and OSS projects like OpenStack, Edgar recently founded the Operations SIG (Special Interest Group). Just as he recognized that “the community needed a place to discuss how to operate Spinnaker better,” he also urges us to jump-start the Spinnaker community. He’s recommended improvements to the contributor experience, and persuaded Salesforce to sponsor this first-ever Spinnaker hackathon.

Of course, we touched on his most pressing open-source Spinnaker initiatives in our chat. Next up? Gather a team! 

“We really want to come to the hackathon with goals, and to put extra motivation for folks to address them as a community,” Edgar explains their sponsorship.

From Salesforce and the Ops SIG perspective, Edgar has two features stories to focus on at the hackathon:

  • “Run any OSS source code scanning software against Spinnaker microservices, and you’ll find a number of vulnerabilities in the libraries that Spinnaker leverages. We’d like to minimize and solve those as much as possible.” 
    • I’m pumped about this one because a) in many instances, this is a low-barrier-to-entry task that newer contributors can make a huge dent in, and b) every ops freak knows that fixing OSS dependencies is probably the most important security measure we touch. 
  • “Cloud driver scalability is another key initiative in progress. The dynamic account system works, but performance can be improved drastically for those using a large system with 800-1000 Kubernetes accounts. There was a bugfix in 1.17, but it still takes lots of time for clouddriver to cache new accounts, and this means a long startup time.”
    • Edgar would like to see new accounts dynamically appended to the cache instead of triggering another cache of all accounts, and has been collaborating with Armory engineers on a solution. Another excellent project goal for Community Gardening!

Here on Armory’s Community team, we second Edgar’s suggestion to make Spinnaker more “beginner-friendly” and welcoming to new contributors. Our top goals for the first half of 2020 revolve around improving the contributor experience, from promoting issue triage in SIGs, to creating and organizing documentation around Spinnaker development environment, release cycle, and contribution guidelines so that newcomers know where to find answers and how to get started. Expect to see a contributor experience project from us at the hackathon!

In the meantime, the Plugin Framework for Spinnaker that Armory and Netflix are building is maturing fast. This work will make Spinnaker more welcoming to contributors in another way: it provides clear extension points in the codebase, along with an easy way to load extensions to a running Spinnaker instance. With the Spinnaker Gardening Days, we want encourage you to build extensions. Moreover, we know that many teams using Spinnaker in production have already built custom tooling around it; we’re encouraging those teams to leverage the plugin framework to quickly share their work with the OSS community (sounds like a stellar hackathon project!). We’re better together, and with a widely adopted project like Spinnaker, you can feel sure that paying it forward will reap big dividends for you and your organization. Check out the Plugin Creators Guide and Plugin Users Guide to learn more!

Calling Edgar and all other incredible Spinnaker developers: it’s time to add your fantastic Spinnaker Gardening ideas to the Project Ideas Wiki, create a slack channel for your project, and start prepping for the most exciting online event of 2020! Don’t forget to register here and reserve your ticket : )

spinnaker-hackathon gardening readme

Learn more in the spinnaker-hackathon/gardening README

Mar 12
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CDF Turns One – Happy Birthday! 🎂

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Last year on the 12th of March 2019, the Continuous Delivery Foundation was launched at the Open Source Leadership Summit. Community leaders from Spinnaker, Jenkins, Tekton and Jenkins X came together to kick off the CDF as the new home for open source collaboration in CI/CD. 

Since then we have made a lot of progress – earlier this year we produced our first annual report that showcases our efforts from our first few months. We also produced the first CD Foundation Interactive Landscape to help clarify the tools needed to adopt a fully automated CD process.

We didn’t stop there! Our CI/CD meetups are now at 25,000+ members in 67 groups spread across 30 countries! There’s probably a CI/CD meetup nearby you. Come participate!

We also have Special Interest Groups (SIGs) in Interoperability, Security, and Machine Learning (MLOps) as ways for people to participate in specific areas of expertise or interest.

And we’ve had a wide array of new members and new projects join. Membership spans a broad range of industries, international markets, and sizes of organizations. New members in the past year include Japanese Global 500 IT services provider Fujitsu, Integration Platform-as-a-Service provider Boomi, DevOps platform Cycloid, the Association of DevOps Professionals, the DevOps Institute, Global commerce leader eBay, leading global financial services firm JPMorgan Chase, and Open Source components management company Whitesource. 

These new General Members bring the membership total to 33 and join Premier Members CapitalOne, CircleCI, Cloudbees, Fujitsu, Google, Huawei, IBM, jFrog, Netflix and Salesforce in working together to make continuous delivery tools and processes as accessible and reliable as possible and grow the overall ecosystem. 

And just last month Screwdriver joined as our first incubation project. Screwdriver is a self-contained, pluggable service to help developers build, test, and continuously deliver software using the latest containerization technologies. Screwdriver was originally developed by Yahoo, now Verizon Media, as simplified interfacing for Jenkins. It was open sourced in 2016 and completely rebuilt to handle deployments at scale along with CI/CD goals.

Where are we headed? In our first year we have mapped out our 9 strategic objectives and our one year anniversary is a great way to round up how we are doing working towards them.

  1. Drive Continuous Delivery Adoption – The CDF Interactive Landscape was one big initiative kicked off this year to help clarify the tools needed to adopt a fully automated CD process.
  2. Cultivate Growth of Projects – With our 4 founding projects: Jenkins, Jenkins X, Spinnaker and Tekton, plus more recently Screwdriver.cd, we are constantly looking at our project growth and ways to measure and drive this such as through, speaker bureau, mentoring programs, infrastructure lab, etc.  
  3. Foster Tool Interoperability – Aiming for tool integration, interoperability and standards is a key focus, driven by the work of the Interoperability SIG and with emerging efforts such as mapping CI/CD terminology across projects. 
  4. Champion Diversity & Inclusion – Initiatives in this space include diversity scholarships for our events and participation in Outreachy which have allowed us to start welcoming more voices into our communities. 
  5. Foster Community Relations – We have started soliciting priorities and working with many different communities. The Jenkins Area Meetups were contributed to CDF and expanded to CI/CD meetups and we also offer online training courses.  
  6. Grow the membership base – We are proud to have a membership of over 30 organizations which includes end user companies, vendors, start-ups, universities and institutes. 
  7. Create value for all members – We continue to listen to feedback from our individual and organization members. We held many events in 2019 including our popular mindshare cocktail hour as a way to stay close to the needs of our members. 
  8. Promote security as a first class citizen – Good security is an important collaborative effort spearheaded by the Security SIG and efforts to get serious about open source security. 
  9. Expand into emerging tech areas – One of the key area has been around MLOps – marrying DevOps with Machine learning through the efforts of our MLOps Special Interest Group.

We have had a lot of work done by our community. Thank you! And we have lots more fun on the way.

To keep up-to-date, sign up for our newsletter and join us in 2020 as we continue to grow and advance CI/CD in the industry!

More CD Foundation Resources!

Mar 11
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From Spinnaker – Monitoring Spinnaker: SLA Metrics

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Originally posted on the Spinnaker Community blog, by Rob Zienert, Sr Software Engineer @ Netflix

Long, long ago, in an internet that I barely remember, I wrote about monitoring Orca. I haven’t managed to take the time to write another post about a specific service — it’s a lot of work! Instead of going deep this time around, I want to paint with broader strokes: What are the key metrics we can track that help quickly answer the question, “Is Spinnaker healthy?”

Spinnaker is comprised of about a dozen open source services that may vary widely based on configuration, and as such, there’s no singular metric to rule them all. This makes the question, “Is Spinnaker healthy?” a particularly bothersome question since not all services are equally important. If Igor — the service that is responsible for monitoring CI/SCM systems — is unable to communicate with Jenkins, Spinnaker will be in a degraded state, but its core behavior is still healthy. Should Orca’s queue processing drop to zero, however, it’s time to have an elevated heart rate and quick remedy.

Service Metrics

The Service Level Indicators for our individual services can vary depending on configuration. For example, Clouddriver has cloud provider-specific metrics that should be tracked in addition to its core metrics. For the sake of this post’s length, I won’t be going into any cloud-specific metrics.

Universal Metrics

All Spinnaker services are RPC-based, and as such, the reliability of requests inbound and outbound are supremely important: If the services can’t talk to each other reliably, someone will be having a poor experience.

For each service, a controller.invocations metric is emitted, which is a PercentileTimer including the following tags:

  • status: The HTTP status code family, 2xx, 3xx, 4xx...
  • statusCode: The actual HTTP status code value, 204, 302, 429...
  • success: If the request is considered successful. There’s nuance here in the 4xx range, but 2xx and3xx are definitely all successful, whereas 5xx definitely are not
  • controller: The Spring Controller class that served this request
  • method: The Spring Controller method name, NOT the HTTP method

Similarly, each service also emits metrics for each RPC client that is configured via okhttp.requests. That is, Orca will have a variety of metrics for its Echo client, as well as its Clouddriver client. This metric has the following tags:

  • status: The HTTP status code family, 2xx, 3xx, 4xx...
  • statusCode: The actual HTTP status code value, 204, 302, 429...
  • success: If the request is considered successful
  • authenticated: Whether or not the request was authenticated or anonymous (if Fiat is disabled, this is always false)
  • requestHost: The DNS name of the client. Depending on your topology, some services may have more than one client to a particular service (like Igor to Jenkins, or Orca to Clouddriver shards).
Example of our 24/7 request fanout from Gate. One interesting tidbit: The sudden increase in traffic at 9am is the increased traffic to Clouddriver (bottom) from Chaos Monkey starting its daily light mayhem!

Having SLOs — and consequentially, alerts — around failure rate (determined via the succcess tag) and latency for both inbound and outbound RPC requests is, in my mind, mandatory across all Spinnaker services.

As a real world example, the alert Netflix uses for Orca to all of its client services is:

nf.cluster,orca-main.*,:re,
name,okhttp.requests,:eq,:and,
status,(,Unknown,5xx,),:in,:and,
statistic,count,:eq,:and,
:sum,
(,nf.cluster,),:by,
0.2,:gt,3,
:rolling-count,3,:ge

So, for people who can’t read Atlas expressions, if we have more than 0.2 failing/unknown RPS to a specific service over 3 minutes, we’ll get an alert.

Service-specific Metrics

Most of our services have an additional metric to judge operational health, but in/out RPC monitoring will go far if you’re just starting out.

  • Echo
    echo.triggers.count tracks the number of CRON-triggered pipeline executions fired. This value should be pretty steady, so any significant deviation is an indicator of something going awry (or the addition/retirement of a customer integration).
    echo.pubsub.messagesProcessed is important if you have any PubSub triggers. Your mileage may vary, but Netflix can alert if any subscriptions drop to zero for more than a few minutes.
  • Orca
    task.invocations.duration tracks how long individual queue tasks take to execute. While it is a Timer, for an SLA Metric, its count is what’s important. This metric’s value can vary widely, but if it drops to zero, it means Orca isn’t processing any new work, so Spinnaker is dead in the water from a core behavior perspective.
  • Clouddriver: Each cloud provider is going to emit its own metrics that can help determine health, but two universal ones I recommend tracking are related to its cache.
    cache.drift tracks cache freshness. You should group this by agent and region to be granular on exactly what cache collection is falling behind. How much lag is acceptable for your org is up to you, but don’t make it zero.
    executionCount tracks the number of caching agent executions and combined with status , we can track how many specific caching agents are failing at any given time.
Here, one collection for a specific AWS service in our largest region was getting stale. In this case, while AWS availability was fine for Clouddriver, Edda was having trouble refreshing.
It’s OK that there are failures in agents: As stable as we like to think our cloud providers are, it’s still another software system and software will fail. Unless you see sustained failure, there’s not much to worry about here. This is often an indicator of a downstream cloud provider issue.
  • Igor
    pollingMonitor.failed tracks the failure rate of CI/SCM monitor poll cycles. Any value above 0 is a bad place to be, but is often a result of downstream service availability issues such as Jenkins going offline for maintenance.
    pollingMonitor.itemsOverThreshold tracks a polling monitor circuit breaker. Any value over 0 is a bad time, because it means the breaker is open for a particular monitor and it requires manual intervention.

Product SLAs at Netflix

We also track specific metrics as they pertain to some of our close internal customers. Some customers care most about latency reading our cloud cache, others have strict requirements in latency and reliability of ad-hoc pipeline executions.

In addition to tracking our own internal metrics for each customer, we also subscribe to our customers’ alerts against Spinnaker. If internal metrics don’t alert us of a problem before our customers are aware something is wrong, we at least don’t want to wait for our customers to tell us.

Continued Observability Improvements

Since Spinnaker is such a large, varied system, blog posts such as these are fine, but really are meant to get the wheels turning on what could be possible. It also highlights a problem with Spinnaker today: A lack of easily discoverable operational insights and knobs. No one should have to rely on a core contributor to distill information like this into a blog post!

There’s already been a start to improving automated service configuration property documentation, but something similar needs to be started for metrics and matching admin APIs as well. A contribution that documents metrics, their tags, purpose and related alerts would be of huge impact to the project and something I’d be happy to mentor on and/or jumpstart.

Of course, if you want to get involved in improving Spinnaker’s operational characteristics, there’s a Special Interest Group for that. We’d love to see you there!

Mar 09
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From Spinnaker – Future of SRE: Robert Keng Builds a DeploymentBot #withSpinnaker

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Originally posted on the Spinnaker Community blog, by Rosalind Benoit

Coming soon from Chime to OSS, a software delivery chatbot which uses Slack to deploy apps via Spinnaker

Last month I had the pleasure of chatting with Robert Keng, a Lead SRE at Chime, about a Slack-integrated ChatBot he recently built to facilitate lightweight, direct deployments for developers. Chime’s continuous delivery is based on Spinnaker, driven with signal-based GitOps. Via pipelines, merged release branches are auto-deployed from a continuous integration (CI) solution, through QA to production with no human interaction interaction.

However, it hasn’t always been this way; Chime has roots in a legacy build environment, largely for Ruby-on-Rails development. It’s based on configuration management tools such as Salt, and thus not containerized, but pointed at long-lived infrastructure. So, containerization formed an important milestone in Chime’s continuous delivery adoption. Luckily, according to Robert, its high-trust, growth minded culture and workflows have supported the evolution.

Chime’s culture also provides flexibility that highlights Spinnaker’s power to accelerate digital transformation. Robert explains that, in some instances, it makes sense for developers to deploy straight to a test environment, bypassing CI. When adding a small feature to a mobile app, for example, I might want to bypass CI wait time to deploy and experiment with behavior (raise your hand if you‘ve built an app and never done that…didn’t think so!)

Meeting Chime devs where they’re @

“We’re cutting the straight-to-prod patch fix deployments down to zero,” Robert clarifies, and he’s done it by creating a flexible system with Spinnaker that models Chime’s culture of trust. At any time, if the devs he enables would rather execute commands in Slack to deploy branches to environments of their choosing, they can. Robert has created a tool that allows them that agency, while empowering them to address complex use cases, for example, adding logic into the Slack commands to deploy dynamic environments into different Kubernetes clusters. In production, “If we need to scale customers on the Z-axis, and build multiple app versions with different backends to target different service providers” as deployment targets, with Spinnaker, Chime can. Robert points out:

“Spinnaker offers a lot of agility in that respect. It would be hard to accommodate gitOps and chatOps in the same place without it.”

In a prime example of the opportunities to solve that Spinnaker provides as a platform, Robert has created a golden path which allows Chime’s teams to iterate in a safe environment. To create it, Robert analyzed workflows as they are and designed an alternative workflow that mapped what he observed in Spinnaker. This, combined with the auto-deploy strategy, tells the story, written in pipelines, of how Chime engineers deliver software. This way, as an SRE, he can rely on automated guardrails for safety regardless of the deployment path. As Kelsey Hightower says, it “serializes the culture in tools” in a way that’s seamless, painless, and purposefully abstracted.

Because at the end of the day, it’s not about the tools. It’s about your story, which in Chime’s case, is all about changing the way people feel about banking. What products and services do you delight your customers with? What’s your story? You can tell it #withSpinnaker

One DeploymentBot, Headed for OSS Spinnaker

The tool, in a multi-service design, has a component which handles the request/response communication with Slack, a frontend that leverages Okta user groups to control who can access Spinnaker, and a Python backend which processes the request data in batches. This architecture evolved from using webhooks to, at Armory’s suggestion, using client certs for faster authentication, and from a monolith version to microservices, because of constraints encountered in the bot’s development. The top constraint: the Slack Events API’s requirement that a response from requests arising from message actions be received within 3 seconds.

This constraint presented challenges in actions like querying Vault for certificates to authenticate against Spinnaker, and even in token exchange with Slack. Breaking the chatbot into pieces allowed Robert to create a responsive, extensible service to deliver a full-featured experience for Chime devs. “It’s turned into a monster,” he grins. “I have tons of feature requests for additional functionality already” (because his devs love using it).

Next steps for Robert’s Bot include developing it against the entire Spinnaker API to leverage all features available, and adding more dynamic capability. He wants to enable devs to use the bot to deal with existing pipelines and executions, and adjust parameters and other configuration via a scripted payload directly from Slack.

Another important next step? Open-sourcing the DeploymentBot! Robert’s very busy with projects right now (read more below), but I’ll hook him up with support from Armory engineers, if needed, to help get this invention to the masses.

The Future of Site Reliability, Platforms, and DevOps Engineering

As he describes his plans for the Bot, we start talking about the myth of NoOps. I have my own words about the opportunities and fallacies of Dev + Ops, but here, Robert’s voice speaks for itself:

“My team isn’t DevOps, it’s SRE (Site Reliability Engineering). DevOps is just part of what we do. As tech stacks mature, we’re seeing less dependency on direct hardware interaction, but that doesn’t mean the management complexity goes away; it actually gets worse. Here’s an easy example: We have this awesome thing called Kubernetes. Given config maps and secrets, where is the source of truth? Ask anyone in the community, and they’ll say, ‘Umm…build it yourself!’ I know Hashicorp released a sidecar method to inject values, but none of that is complete. This is why there’s a lot of custom work in the community, and companies are building their own mutating webhook controllers, for example, which is what we’re doing. You can’t buy this stuff, because it doesn’t exist.

We have our own way of injecting Vault secrets which 100% bypasses Kubernetes stuff, because we can’t version it, and we can’t manage it from any source or truth, as it’s scattered across 1000 namespaces. It’s impossible to manage in one place. So in our environment, we put everything in Vault, whether it’s configuration, or secrets. That gives us a common interface to code against. In V1, we’re using init containers, which is exactly what Hashicorp’s sidecar does. In V2, depending on the environment, we’ll grab values from different Vault clusters, since storing production and non-production values in the same place is just, suicide. You’ll get a huge ban hammer from your security team, and no-one wants that.

So we’re building, and we’re operating it at the same time. And are developers ever going to touch these [tools]? No! There are a lot of these instances in Kubernetes where things just don’t exist, so what do you do?Same thing for, EC2, and ECS even. Then, moving into Knative, and Lambas, and serverless computing and functions, it’s even worse. It’s a free-for-all. We’re designing our own framework.

The next thing we’re looking at is building plugins that will plug in our code, and use Spinnaker to deploy it [on that infra]. I heard Armory is working on something similar for deploying Lambdas, and I’m desperately waiting, because it’s going to make my life easier. Functions in general are kind of useless. The ecosystem around them is more important; you’ve got to think about API gateways, API management, queues, load balancers, etc. How do I wrap that into a sane framework where we can consistently build, integrate, test, and deploy? I don’t want to use 10 different ways to do the same thing. I’d rather just have everything work in Spinnaker.”

Then when we start talking about making that happen. I tell Robert about the Community Gardening Days I’m planning for Spinnaker this Spring (keep your eyes peeled! Announcement forthcoming on Spinnaker.io and social), and he gets psyched about Chime’s involvement. Music to my ears!

Look out for more articles from me on the Spinnaker developer and contributor experience. I’ll shine a light on the way Open Source Heroes like Robert are getting into the ecosystem as they enable the delivery of software products and services. Hang on, the latest industrial revolution (where software truly changes the freaking world for the better!) is just taking off.

Please share this on Twitter, LinkedIn, and HackerNews and give Robert some glory : )

Mar 06
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From Spinnaker – Open your first issue to get started as a contributor

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Originally posted on the Spinnaker Community blog, by Rosalind Benoit

Why are most periodicals so sad? Because we have too many issues!

A problem the Spinnaker community currently ISN’T having ^^

I’d like to start sharing one IC’s experience (mine : ) dropping anchor into the Spinnaker ecosystem. I found the community last year before joining the tribe at Armory, while doing research for another continuous delivery product built on Tekton. First step: join Spinnaker slack, and behold the community live, with active SIG channels, newcomers, and operators constantly pinging to discuss what they encounter in the platform.

What’s the next step? Personally, I began creeping on Spinnaker.io, joined the Docs SIG which maintains the site, and began to engage by commenting on and submitting web-dev PRs in the site’s repository to get the ball rolling. Next up: get my full Spinnaker dev environment set up, and document that process for y’all!

If you’re an end-user, your path may look different: you may have used Spinnaker to deploy an application, and encountered a usability issue or found something not quite right from your perspective. In this case, reaching out on Slack in the #general or relevant SIG channel, or filing an issue in the spinnaker/spinnaker repository describing your observation is the next step. As a final note to end-users, having spoken to Andy Glover and a few TOC members about this at some length, I can say on good authority:Why end-users and new contributors should submit issues to the project

Why end-users and new contributors should submit issues to the project

Push past your fear in filing an issue! At this stage in its growth, the “too many issues” problem doesn’t exist. We’ll skip across that bridge when we come to it. Now, we need your feedback to make the most mature and production-ready continuous delivery platform the BEST platform on the planet. Don’t be shy!

Operators will also follow their own path to begin contributing. Perhaps you’ve found a great growth opportunity for the codebase as you’ve hacked through workflows. Maybe you’ve developed a rockin’ integration to solve for interoperability at your organization, and you know it may benefit others in the community. Or, that small tweak made to your organization’s Spinnaker instance has improved usability, but hasn’t been addressed in the community.

YES, your time is precious, but I urge you, don’t wait! Sharing your contributions will help the ecosystem, and it will also help you. It puts you on the map. It adds gravitas to your resume. It exposes you to peer recognition, and provides networking with some teeth, as your community footprint will speak for itself. Better yet, if you start a fix or conversation, others in the community can advise, or build on what you started, helping you solve faster.

If you’d like to add a feature to Spinnaker, that should start as a discussion, so file an issue in the spinnaker/spinnaker repository describing the purpose and proposed implementation, or start the discussion at a SIG meeting. Got something smaller-scale, like a bug fix? The Submitting A Patch page on spinnaker.io provides guidance. Integrating another service, or building an extension? Check out the Plugin Users Guide, as utilizing the new plugin framework allows you to maintain plugin code in a separate repository and avoid the requirement of loading extensions at Spinnaker runtime.

If that’s a bit overwhelming for now, don’t despair. Getting started is the first step. Noticed something confusing in the docs, or have a suggestion for spinnaker.io? Have ideas on what kinds of Contributor Experience materials would help you move forward? Please ping us in #SIG-Documentation or file an issue in spinnaker/spinnaker.github.io!

That’s all for today, but stay tuned for more N8B Diaries as I work to guide Spinnaker operators in contributing their inventions, and set up my own environment. High-five your imposter syndrome and become a *real* Spinnaker contributor with me!

Mar 04
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From Screwdriver – Improvements and Fixes

By Blog

Originally posted on the Screwdriver blog, by the Screwdriver Team from Verizon Media

UI

  • Enhancement: Upgrade to node.js v12.
  • Enhancement: Users can now link to custom test & coverage URL via metadata.
  • Enhancement: Reduce number of API calls to fetch active build logs.
  • Enhancement: Display proper title for Commands and Templates pages.
  • Bug fix: Hide “My Pipelines” from Add to collection dialogue.
  • Enhancement: Display usage stats for a template.
image

API

Store

Compatibility List

In order to have these improvements, you will need these minimum versions:

  • UI – v1.0.491
  • API – v0.5.851
  • Store – v3.10.5

Contributors

Thanks to the following contributors for making this feature possible:

Questions and Suggestions

We’d love to hear from you. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out here. You can also visit us on Github and Slack.

Feb 24
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Descartes Labs – Implementation of Spinnaker Pipelines – The End of Waterfall

By Blog

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

Feb 19
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Screwdriver Joins CD Foundation as Its First Incubation Project – Treating Continuous Delivery as a First-Class Citizen in the Build Pipeline

By Announcement, Blog

The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), a vendor-neutral home for many of the fastest-growing projects for continuous delivery, is announcing Screwdriver as its newest incubation project. Screwdriver is a self-contained, pluggable service to help developers build, test, and continuously deliver software using the latest containerization technologies. Screwdriver was originally developed by Yahoo, now Verizon Media, as simplified interfacing for Jenkins. It was open sourced in 2016 and completely rebuilt to handle deployments at scale along with CI/CD goals.

Screwdriver ties directly into DevOps teams’ daily habits. It tests pull requests, builds merged commits, and deploys to any environment. It also defines load tests, canary deployments, and multi-environment deployment pipelines with ease.

Begin contributing to Screwdriver today. Pull requests are always welcome. Start by browsing the Screwdriver contributing guide.

“The CD Foundation welcomes Screwdriver. We believe Screwdriver is off to an excellent start, and we’re excited to be working together. By joining the CD Foundation, Screwdriver will be able to scale more quickly, taking greater strides forward in development and deployment,” said Dan Lopez, CDF program manager. “With so many supported integrations, Screwdriver provides the openness and flexibility that DevOps teams require.”

“The Screwdriver team and platform are heroes at Yahoo and Verizon Media for helping us run our massive software engineering operations at scale. Together we can make your CI/CD team heroes at your company too. We invite you to work with us in this neutral home for open source excellence.” Gil Yehuda, Sr. Director of Open Source, Verizon Media/Yahoo.

“It’s great to see Screwdriver joining the CDF. I know the people behind the project are passionate about the same thing we are, and together we can make a bigger impact faster. Open source has a proven unique ability of achieving that across project boundaries,” said Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Co-CEO at Launchable, Inc.

The CD Foundation provides a wide range of services to projects, and the first step is starting as an Incubation Project. Full details on bringing an open source CI/CD project to the CDF are available here.

“Our team is thrilled to join the CDF. Together with our partners from Yahoo! Japan and all our external contributors we’ll continue to rapidly deliver solutions which support developer workflows and interoperability with various Continuous Delivery solutions.” Jithin Emmanuel, Sr. Engineering Manager, Verizon Media/Yahoo and Product Owner for Screwdriver.

For more information on getting involved with Screwdriver, please visit:

CD Foundation Resources

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