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Apr 09
Love0

Screwdriver: Build cache – Disk Strategy

By Blog, Project

Screwdriver now has the ability to cache and restore files and directories from your builds to either s3 or disk-based storage. Rest all features related to the cache feature remains the same, only a new storage option is added. Please DO NOT USE this cache feature to store any SENSITIVE data or information.

The graph below is our Internal Screwdriver instance build-cache comparison between disk-based strategy vs aws s3.

Build cache – get cache – (disk strategy)

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Build cache – get cache – (s3)

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Build cache – set cache – (disk strategy)

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Build cache – set cache – (s3)

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Why disk-based strategy?

Based on the cache analysis, 1. The majority of time was spent pushing data from build to s3, 2. At times the cache push fails if the cache size is big (ex: >1gb). So, simplified the storage part by using a disk cache strategy and using filer/storage mount as a disk option. Each cluster will have its own filer/storage disk mount.

NOTE: When a cluster becomes unavailable and if the requested cache is not available in the new cluster, the cache will be rebuilt once as part of the build.

Cache Size: 

Max size limit per cache is configurable by Cluster admins.

Retention policy:

Cluster admins are responsible to enforce retention policy.

Cluster Admins:

Screwdriver cluster-admin has the ability to specify the cache storage strategy along with other options like compression, md5 check, cache max limit in MB

Reference: 

  1. https://github.com/screwdriver-cd/screwdriver/blob/master/config/default.yaml#L280
  2. https://github.com/screwdriver-cd/executor-k8s-vm/blob/master/index.js#L336
  3. Issue: https://github.com/screwdriver-cd/screwdriver/issues/1830

Compatibility List:

In order to use this feature, you will need these minimum versions:

Contributors:

Thanks to the following people for making this feature possible:

Screwdriver is an open-source build automation platform designed for Continuous Delivery. It is built (and used) by Yahoo. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have questions or would like to contribute: http://docs.screwdriver.cd/about/support.

Apr 09
Love0

Spinnaker: 1.18 Release Introduces Spinnaker Community Stats

By Blog, Project

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!

Mar 16
Love0

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

By Blog, Project
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 11
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From Spinnaker – Monitoring Spinnaker: SLA Metrics

By Blog, Project

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
Love0

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

By Blog, Project

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

By Blog, Project

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, Project

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.

Jan 28
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Tekton in 2020 and beyond!

By Blog, Project

This blog post has been written by the owners of the different projects, and in particular, huge thanks to Christie Wilson, Andrea Frittoli, Adam Roberts and Vincent Demeester!

At the end of last year Dan wrote the blog post: A Year of Tekton. It was a great retrospective on what happened since the bootstrap of the project; a highly recommended read! Now that we’re getting into the swing of 2020, let’s reflect again back on 2019 and look forward to what we can expect for Tekton this year!

Tekton in 2019

We can safely say 2019 (more or less the project’s first year!) was a great year for Tekton. Just like a toddler we tried things, sometimes failed and learned a lot; we are growing fast!

The year 2019 saw 9 releases of Tekton Pipelines, from the first one (0.1.0) to the latest (0.9.2). We shared the work of creating the releases as much as possible, though many contributors are behind the work in each!!

If you are curious about the naming of the release starting from 0.3.x, we decide to spice things up a bit and name our release with a composition of a cat breed and a robot name (in reference to our amazing logo, a robot cat).

Chip, our 0.5.0 mascot!

Aside from the initial project (tektoncd/pipeline), we bootstrapped a bunch of new projects:

  • tektoncd/cli: This project aims to provide an easy to use command line interface to interact with the tekton components. As Tekton objects are Kubernetes components you can always interact with them via the Kubernetes CLI — kubectl, but the kubectl experience can be very ‘raw’ and not very focused. The `tkn` CLI has the ambition to provide an easy to use user experience without having to know anything about kubectl (or Kubernetes for that matter).
  • tektoncd/dashboard: Alongside the CLI project, the Tekton Dashboard provides a user interface for the Tekton components, in a browser. It allows users to manage and view Tekton PipelineRuns and TaskRuns and the resources involved in their creation, execution, and completion.
  • tektoncd/catalog: Tekton pipeline is designed to provide highly shareable objects (Task, Pipeline, Condition, …), so creating a repo to store a catalog of shared Tasks and Pipelines came naturally!
  • tektoncd/experimental: With growing interest in Tekton came a growing number of “feature requests”. In order to be careful about how we expand the scope of Tekton pipeline while still allowing contributors to experiment, we created this repository to allow experiments to happen more easily. Experiments can graduate with enough traction. The biggest project so far is the webhooks extension which combines using the Dashboard project and Triggers to allow users to create webhooks for Git that trigger PipelineRuns.
  • tektoncd/operator: This project aims to provide an operator to manage installation, updation and uninstallation of tektoncd projects (pipeline, …). It has yet to be published in the community OperatorHub.
  • tektoncd/triggers: And speaking of the experimental repo, we have Triggers which started its life there! This project provides lightweight event triggering for Pipelines. 

Looking forward into 2020 🔮

We’ve come a long way but we’ve got more to do! Though we can’t predict what will happen for sure, here is a preview of what we’d like to make happen in 2020!

Beta API, GA

As you’ve seen, we’ve made a lot of changes! Going forward we want to make sure folks who are using and building on top of Tekton can have more stability guarantees. With that in mind, we are pushing for Tekton Pipelines to have a beta release early in 2020. If you are interested in following along with your progress, please join the beta working group! Or keep an eye on our Twitter for the big announcement.

Once we’ve announced beta, users should be able to expect increased stability as we’ll be taking our lead from kubernetes and mirroring their deprecation policy, for example any breaking changes will need to be rolled out across 9 months or 3 releases (whichever is longer).

And once we get to beta, why stop there? We’d love to be able to offer users GA stability as soon as we possibly can. After we get to beta, we’ll be looking to progress the types that we didn’t promote to beta (e.g. Conditions), add any important features we don’t yet have (we’re looking at you on failure handling and  “pause and resume” aka “the feature that enables manual approval”!), and then we should be ready to announce GA!

Task Interfaces and PipelineResources

Speaking of types that won’t be going beta right away: PipelineResources! PipelineResources are a type in Tekton that is meant to encapsulate and type data as it moves through your Pipelines, e.g. an image you are building and deploying, or a git commit you’re checking out and building from.

This concept was introduced early on in Tekton and bares a close resemblance to Concourse resources. However as we started trying to add more features to them, we started discovering some interesting edges to the way we had implemented them that caused us to step back and give them a re-think. Plus, some folks in our community asked the classic question “why PipelineResources” and we found our answer wasn’t as clear as we’d like!

As we started down the path of re-designing, and re-re-designing again, we started to get some clarity on what exactly it was we were trying to create: the interface between Tasks in a Pipeline! And thanks to a revolutionary request to improve our support for volumes, we finally feel we are on the right path! The next steps along this path are to add a few key features, namely the concept of workspaces (i.e. files a Task operates on) and allow Tasks to output values (aka “results”).

Once we have these in place we’ll revisit our designs and our re-designs.

tekton.dev

Hand in hand with our beta plans, we’re revamping our website! Soon at tekton.dev you’ll be able to find introductory material, tutorials, and versioned docs.

The Tekton Catalog

Besides making it easy for folks to implement cloud native CI/CD, one of the most important goals of Tekton is for folks to be able to share and reuse the components that make up your Pipeline. For example, say you want to update Slack with the results of a Task – wouldn’t it be great if there were one battle tested way to do that, with a clean interface?

That’s what the Tekton catalog is all about! To date we’ve received more than 20 Tasks from the community to do everything from running Argo CD to testing your configuration with conftest.

But there’s so much more we want to do! We want to offer versioning and test guarantees that can make it painless for folks to depend on Tasks in the Catalog – and for companies to create Catalogs of their own.

Plus, the Catalog is a great place for us to build better interoperability even between the Tekton projects, for example with the Task that runs tkn (the Tekton CLI).

Shout outs 😻

A community is nothing without its users, contributors, adopters and friends, so we want to explicitly shout outs to our community for their tremendous effort and support in 2019 and hopefully even more in 2020.

Friends

We’ve gained friends and more are always welcome! Our current list of “known friends” includes:

  • Alibaba
  • Ant Financial
  • Cloudbees
  • Elastic
  • Google
  • IBM
  • Puppet
  • Red Hat
  • TriggerMesh

We welcome friend requests! Please submit a PR to https://github.com/tektoncd/friends, this repository acts as a place that allows members of the ecosystem (known as “Tekton Friends”) to self-report in a way that is beneficial to everyone. We’d love to have you as a friend if your company is using Tekton and/or contributing to it 😀

Projects

Adoption of Tekton has grown and became a part of both free and commercial offerings by various companies, demonstrating that Tekton’s valuable and ready for anything

In mid-2019, Puppet launched a new cloud-native CD service called Project Nebula that’s built on Tekton Pipelines. It provides a friendly YAML workflow syntax and niceties like secrets management and a spiffy GUI on top of Tekton instance running in GCP. To coincide with the public beta of Nebula, Scott Seaward keynoted at the Puppetize PDX user conference to talk about how Tekton works under the hood. Since then, the Nebula team has contributed several PRs to the Pipelines repo and are looking forward to working on step interoperability, triggers, and other awesome upstream features in 2020.

Other notable examples include:

Talks, Tweets and Moar 📣

It has been such a privilege to see more and more people get excited about Tekton and share it with the world! Here are some (but not all!!) of the great talks and tweets we saw about Tekton in 2020, not to mention our Tekton contributor summit!

Tara Hernandez recommends standards over specifications at DevOps World

Contributors

Huge shoutouts to all of the tektoncd projects contributors ❤️❤️❤️:

If you are even more curious on the contributions happening in the tektoncd project, you can visit the tekton.devstats.cd.foundation site (e.g. a page showing the overall contributors on all tektoncd projects).

Tekton birds of a feather at Devops Days Bangalore, India

Join us!

If you are interested in contributing to Tekton, we’d love to have you join us! Every tektoncd project has a CONTRIBUTING.md that can point you in the right direction, and our community contains helpful links and guidelines. Feel free to open issues, join slack, or pop into one of our working groups! Hope to see you soon 😀

Jan 27
Love0

Fair Winds & Following Seas: Another Year of Safe, Reliable CD #withSpinnaker

By Blog, Project

It’s 2020, so what’s our New Year’s Resolution?  #1, Make Spinnaker the Perfect Continuous Delivery Platform. 

🤦 Voltaire said “perfect is the enemy of good,” and we’ve seen some resolution-minded ads lately reviving that adage (I’m thinking of Michael Phelps reminding me that Progress IS perfection : )  Striving for perfection in software development can lead to obsolete products. So, we hack. We listen to our users and iterate. When we do that as a community, we can progress towards something truly brilliant. Spinnaker’s progress was perfection in 2019, and by all accounts will exceed that trajectory in 2020. 

Enterprise Adoption Crescendo (of Production workloads)

Spinnaker saw promising early adoption from large companies like Target and Adobe, and this year has been no exception. While literally everyone books stays on the site, oblivious to digital transformation, Airbnb is using Spinnaker to migrate from monolith to service-oriented architecture, and from brittle deployments to continuous delivery. SAP joyfully leverages Spinnaker on its mission to run the world better, and Pinterest uses it to boost productivity as it pioneers visual discovery. Transunion stays ahead of the fintech curve, providing total credit protection through applications it now deploys with Spinnaker, a more full-featured fit for ephemeral infrastructure than its previous Ansible solution.  Companies like Comcast, going all-in on Kubernetes as a software-defined datacenter, have added Spinnaker to manage deployment pipelines. Meanwhile, Salesforce has adopted Spinnaker to bake images based on both Helm charts for Kubernetes and Packer templates for VMs, to support its complex software delivery requirements.

In 2019, we proudly welcomed engineers from new enterprises, including JPMorgan Chase and Home Depot, into the Spinnaker community. Now more than 175 companies have contributed to the project, with over 200 new ICs just last year, and many more companies have become key stakeholders, using and extending Spinnaker. These demonstrate Spinnaker as the mature CD solution, proven to handle production workloads flexibly and scalably. 

Organic Growth Through Governance

As adoption continues to rise, and our community grows, it becomes crucial to create a growth-adapted project space. A transparent structure for building and maintaining the project invites new companies and users to take an active role in shaping Spinnaker’s future. To that end, 2019 saw the governance process and entities created in 2018 codified in GitHub, along with a process for modifying it via PRs and votes from members of the TOC and Steering Committee. Spinnaker governance also blossomed into an active space encompassing 8 community-initiated SIGs which organize contributors around feature growth and maintenance in areas of interest. SIGs welcome anyone to join, and we saw growing attendance from end-user companies in H2 2019. As the TOC experiments with public Open Office Hours, Spinnaker Slack is always open, and welcomes nearly 8500 participants to troubleshoot, chat with a SIG team, or reach out to a community member any time. Coupled with the donation of the project to the CDF, these growth factors signal the founding of Spinnaker as a neutral, democratized project space. Our goal? Fuel rapid innovation as we work to empower humanity to deliver their innovations, faster.

#BetterTogether: Driving SDLC Ecosystem Innovation

What came out of this investment in 2019? Where to begin…! An OSS ecosystem thrives with modular components that allow operators to optimize for business goals and maintain compliance. As our user base grows, the problem set expands, use cases vary, and we innovate across a richer toolchain. This allows us to create a smarter, more automated experience. Case(s) in point: 

  • New data sources added for SignalFX and New Relic, to inform Automated Canary Analysis decisions that let app owners sleep instead of being paged. 
  • A new Gremlin integration allowing chaos experimentation in Spinnaker pipelines will expand in 2020 to provide results useful for automated decision support. 
  • Integrations with artifact repositories Nexus and JFrog’s Artifactory have added new native triggers for Spinnaker pipelines. 
  • New end-to-end secrets management dynamically decrypts Spinnaker secrets as needed for validation and deployment from a backing store of your choosing, such as Vault or S3.

Since interoperability is crucial to Spinnaker, implementing a reliable plugin system was a key 2019 milestone. As our community leverages Spinnaker to solve problems, we must remove friction from the dev’s experience in contributing those extensions to the project. A plugin framework provides libraries and application context to devs, and defines clear extension points to start from when integrating something new. In 2019, we adopted PF4J as our backend plugin-loader framework. In 2020, we’ll implement plugin loading in the Spinnaker UI, and foster community around building and sharing plugins, to enrich our ecosystem.

Cloud Providers – Raining Champions  : P

Spinnaker depends on cloud provider investment in extending the project for deployment to the ever-growing variety of ephemeral infra solutions. In 2019, engineers at Google developed a blueprint for a production-ready Spinnaker instance on GKE, integrated with Google Cloud services such as Cloud Build. Amazon Engineers have extended cloud providers for AWS services, ensuring that we can deploy with Spinnaker to any attribute available in Fargate or ECS (Elastic Container Service). As of this year, that includes any task definition attribute. AWS also added full support for deployments to serverless applications using AWS Lambda, including the ability to use Lambda functions as ALB targets.

Migrating to the cloud alleviates headaches, while bringing new operational challenges. Spinnaker evolves to capture and solve for these new challenges as we encounter them.  The extendable Swabbie service, created in 2019, tackles the tedium (and potential nightmare at scale!) of reaping unused resources programmatically, to help optimize cloud spend. With Swabbie, an operator can set rules for cleanup candidates via YAML, and clean resources according to a configurable schedule. Deployments to highly automated cloud environments prompted enablement of dynamic account creation, discovery, and configuration for Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes accounts in the cloud.

Upleveling Functionality = Perfect Progress 

The Kubernetes V2 Provider for Spinnaker also came into its own last year, offering the ability to deploy, delete, scale, and roll back K8S manifests as artifacts managed as code. The Kubernetes SIG iterated fast to improve the V2 user experience by surfacing more kubectl commands in the Spinnaker UI, and improving management of rollout strategies. They also enhanced traffic management to enable more deployment patterns with the provider, such as blue/green (AKA red/black) and dark canary. In 2020, simplifying the Kubernetes developer experience is an important roadmap element, and the community will tackle it by visualizing more K8S resources in the Spinnaker UI, and improving terminology, error, and workflow management.

Under the hood, 2019 saw lots of effort to provide operators the option to back Spinnaker with a MySQL database instead of Redis. Stateful data in Spinnaker enables event routing and orchestration for pipelines, integrated CI and SCM events, and Swabbie cleanup notifications. The choice of whether to use a relational DB or in-memory store to manage that data gives operators the freedom to optimize performance for their workloads and infrastructure. This makes all that effort, which required updating several microservices, including Echo, the eventing service, and Orca, the orchestration engine, well worth it. Likewise, updates to the Authorization model have allowed even more granular permissions to be durably API-driven across the platform.

A Bright Future Won’t Blind Us (to Your Story)

One high-level 2020 goal aims to better incorporate user stories and enterprise use cases into Spinnaker’s trajectory. The steering committee has committed to building a roadmap that tells high-level stories about using Spinnaker to solve problems. Tool chain interoperability, notably with Kubernetes, cloud providers, and monitoring systems figure large in the H1 2020 Roadmap. Managed Delivery, an exciting Spinnaker CD initiative incubating at Netflix, uniquely responds to a common narrative around software delivery. It uses declarative automation to alleviate the operational knowledge and maintenance burden that comes with ownership of modern, continuously delivered applications.

Users can help us tell the best Spinnaker stories by submitting comments and issues describing usage and business context. Please visit Spinnaker.io (which the Docs SIG will overhaul in 2020) and check out our Success Stories page. Join us on Spinnaker Slack or in the Spinnaker org and tell your tale! 

Jan 16
Love0

Happy Second Birthday Jenkins X!

By Blog, Project

Originally posted in the Jenkins X blog by Rob Davies

Second year of Jenkins X

The Jenkins X project started the beginning of 2019 by celebrating its first birthday on the 14th January, a big event for any open source project, and we have just celebrated our 2nd – hooray!

image by Ashley McNamara, creative commons license

Two Years of Jenkins X!

Jenkins X has evolved from a vision of how CI/CD could be reimagined in a cloud native world, to a fast-moving, innovative, rapidly maturing open source project.

Jenkins X was created to help developers ship code fast on Kubernetes. From the start, Jenkins X has focused on improving the developer experience. Using one command line tool, developers can create a Kubernetes cluster, deploy a pipeline, create an app, create a GitHub repository, push the app to the GitHub repository, open a Pull Request, build a container, run that container in Kubernetes, merge to production. To do this, Jenkins X automates the installation and configuration of a whole bunch of best in breed open source tools, and automates the generation of all the pipelines. Jenkins X also automates the promotion of an application through testing, staging, and production environments, enabling lots of feedback on proposed changes. For example, Jenkins X preview environments allow for fast and early feedback as developers can review actual functionality in an automatically provisioned environment. We’ve found that preview environments, created automatically inside the pipelines created by Jenkins X, are very popular with developers, as they can view changes before they are merged to master.

Jenkins X is opinionated, yet easily extensible. Built to enable DevOps best practices, Jenkins X is designed to the deployment of large numbers of distributed microservices in a repeatable and manageable fashion, across multiple teams. Jenkins X facilitates proven best practices like trunk based development and GitOps. To get you up and running quickly, Jenkins X comes with lots of example quickstarts.

Highlights of 2019

February 2019: The rise of Tekton!

In the second half of 2018, Jenkins X embarked on a journey to provide a Serverless Jenkins and run a pipeline engine only when required. That pipeline engine was based on the knative build-pipeline project which evolved into Tekton with much help and love from both the Jenkins and Jenkins X communities. The Jenkins X project completed its initial integration with Tekton in February 2019. Tekton is a powerful and flexible kubernetes-native open source framework for creating CI/CD pipelines, managing artifacts and progressive deployments.

March 2019: Jenkins X joined The Continuous Delivery Foundation!

Jenkins X joined the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) as a founding project alongside Jenkins, Spinnaker, and Tekton. Joining a vendor-neutral foundation, focused on Continuous Delivery, made a lot of sense to the Jenkins X community. There had already been a high level of collaboration with the Jenkins and Tekton communities, and there have been some very interesting and fruitful (in terms of ideas) discussions about how to work better with the Spinnaker communities also.

June 2019: Project Lighthouse

When Jenkins X embarked on its serverless jenkins journey, it chose to use Prow, an event handler for GitHub events and ChatOps. Prow is used by the Kubernetes project for building all of its repos and includes a powerful webhook event handler. Prow is well proven, but heavily tied to GitHub, and not easily extendable to other SCM providers. At the end of June 2019, work commenced on a lightweight, extensible alternative to Prow, called Lighthouse. Lighthouse supports the same plugins as Prow (so you can still ask via ChatOps for cats and dogs) and the same config – making migration between Prow and Lighthouse extremely easy.

June 2019: Jenkins X Boot!

We were very busy in June – a frantic burst of activity before summer vacations! One common problem Jenkins X users were facing was the installation of Jenkins X on different Kubernetes clusters. Installing services, ensuring DNS and secrets are correct, and done in the right order is completely different from vendor to vendor, and sometimes cluster to cluster. We realised that to simplify the install, we really needed a pipeline, and whilst this may sound a little like the plot to a film, running a Jenkins X pipeline to install jx really is the best option. The jx boot command interprets the boot pipeline using your local jx binary. The jx boot command can also be used for updating your cluster.

As part of the move to the CDF the Jenkins X project took the opportunity to redesign its logo. An automaton represents the ability of Jenkins X to provide automated CI/CD on Kubernetes and more!

Second half 2019: Big focus on Stability and Reliability

The Jenkins X project has been fast paced with lots of different components and moving parts. This fast pace unfortunately led to some instability and a growth of serious issues that risked undermining all the great work there had been on Jenkins X. There has been a concerted effort by the community to increase stability and reduce outstanding issues – the graph below shows the trend over the last year, with a notable downward trend in the number of issues being created in the last 6 months.

CloudBees also aided this effort by introducing the CloudBees Jenkins X Distribution with increased testing around stabilized configurations and deployments and regular releases every month.

October 2019: Jenkins X Steering Committee inaugural meeting

The Jenkins X Bootstrap Steering Committee is tasked with organising the transition to an elected steering committee, as well as determining what responsibilities the steering committee will have in guiding the Jenkins X project.

December 2019: First Jenkins X Outreachy mentee!

Neha Gupta is adding support for Kustomize in Jenkins X, to enable Kubernetes native configuration management, while participating in Outreachy from December 2019 to March 2020. We welcome Neha’s work on Jenkins X and look forward to building on our culture of continuous mentoring!

Jenkins X usage in Products

The easiest way to try out Jenkins X is undoubtedly through CloudBees CI/CD powered by Jenkins X which provides Jenkins X through the convenience and ease of use of SaaS. No cluster setup, no Jenkins X install, that is all done for you! Currently, CloudBees CI/CD powered by Jenkins X is available for preview. Sign up here to try out the new Jenkins X Saas!

What’s next?

The Jenkins X project is going to be encouraging the community to get involved with more innovation. There are a lot of great ideas to extend the continuous story with integrated progressive delivery (A/B testing, Canary and Blue/Green deployments) and Continuous Verification, alongside more platforms support. We are expecting lots of awesome new features in the CloudBees UI for Jenkins X too.

Expect lots more exciting new announcements from Jenkins X in 2020!

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