Kelsey Hightower, Principal Engineer and Developer Advocate at Google, giving Opening Remarks; event will include hands-on workshops, keynotes, happy hours, and more
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Armory provides enterprise version of Spinnaker, open source continuous delivery multi-cloud project housed under CD Foundation
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Originally posted on the Armory blog by Chad Tripod
Continuous Delivery and Deployment is changing the way organizations deliver software. Over the years, software delivery has morphed into a time consuming process. With countless validations and approvals to ensure the code is safe to present to users. And with good reason, releasing bad software can severely impact a business’s brand, popularity, and even revenue. In this day and age, with customer sentiment immediately feeding back into public visibility, companies are taking even stricter measures to ensure the best software delivery and user experience.
When deploying software to production, we use words like “resilience” to talk about how the code runs in the wild. For the optimists, we use words such as “Availability Zones,” and for those more pessimistic about deployments, we say, “Failure Domains.” When I was architecting and deploying applications for Apple, eBay, and others, I always built for failure. I was always more interested in how things behave when we break things, and less so on the steady state. I’d relish in unleashing tools like Simian Army to wreak havoc on what we had built to ensure code and experience weren’t impaired.
Nowadays, there is a much better approach to ensuring safety. Continuous Delivery (CD) has enabled organizations to shift left. Empowering developers with access to deploy directly to production, but with the guardrails needed to make sure safety isn’t compromised for speed. Luckily, the world-class engineers at Netflix and Google have built a platform, Spinnaker. Spinnaker addresses deployment resiliency concerns and empowers developers with toolsets to validate and verify as a built-in part of delivering code.
Now, let’s break down the modern model and review the tools available in the CI/CD workflow.
Spinnaker – Spinnaker is a high scale multicloud continuous delivery (CD) tool. While leveraging the years of software delivery best practices that Netflix and Google built into Spinnaker, users get to serialize and automate all the decisions that they have baked into their current software delivery process. Approvals, environments, testing, failures, feature flagging, ticketing, etc., are all completely automated and shared across the whole organization. The end result? Built-in safety that allows DevOps teams to deploy software with great velocity.
Continuous Verification – Leveraging real-time KPIs and log messages to dictate the health of code and environment. Spinnaker’s canary deployments ingest real-time metrics from data platforms including Datadog, NewRelic, Prometheus, Splunk, and Istio into a service called Kayenta. Kayenta runs these time series metrics into the Mann Whitney algorithm developed by Netflix and Google, and compares release metrics to current production metrics. Spinnaker will then adjust or roll back deployments automatically based on success criteria. This allows math and data, rather than manual best-guesses, to dictate in real time if the user is getting the best experience from the service.
Chaos Engineering – Why wait for things to break in production to fix them? There are better ways. Chaos Engineering is the practice of breaking things in pre prod environments to understand how the code behaves when it’s exercised. What happens when a dependent service goes offline? How do the other services in the application behave? How does Kubernetes deal with it? What about shutting off a process in a service? These are the measures Gremlin and Chaos Monkey give your developers. Now testing is much more than what your CI Server does, it takes into consideration the environments in which they are deployed.
Service Mesh – Service Meshes are a Kubernetes traffic management solution. Kubernetes applications can traverse many clusters, regions, and even clouds. Service Meshes are a way to manage traffic flows, traceability, and most importantly with ephemeral workloads, observability. There are many flavors of service meshes to choose from. Istio/Envoy has the most visibility, but you can also implement service meshes from nginx, consul, solo.io or even get enterprise support from companies like F5/NGINX+ or Citrix, which offer elevated ingress features. Service Meshes in the context of software delivery provide a very granular canary release. Instead of blindly sending traffic to a canary version for testing, you can instead programmatically use layer 7 traffic characteristics such as URI, host, query, path, and cookie to steer traffic. This allows you to switch only certain users, business partners, or regions to new versions of software.
DevSecOps – In my years seeing changes in technology and how we deliver software to end users, one thing is for sure: security wants to understand the risks in what you’re doing. And with good reason. Security exploits can leak sensitive information or, even expose an organization to malicious hackers. Luckily this new deployment world allows security to process their scans and validations in an automated fashion. Solutions range from Twistlock, Artifactory Xray, Aqua, Signal Science, etc. There are many DevSecOps solutions, so it is a good thing to know that Spinnaker supports them all!
Spinnaker stages automate developer tools:
End Result – As you put together your new cloud native tool chain, there are many ways you can improve the way you release software. I urge you to deploy the tools you need for the service you are providing, not only based on what a vendor is saying. Over time, implementing guardrails will increase your innovation and time to market. For many this will be a competitive advantage against those who move slowly, and investing in these areas will, over time, improve the hygiene of your software code, which will provide stability in your future releases. By de-risking the release processes and improving safety, the end users are given the best possible experience with your software.
Originally posted on the Armory blog by Rosalind Benoit
Folks in the DevOps community often ask me, “I’m already using Jenkins, so why should I use Spinnaker?” We’re hosting a virtual talk to address the question! Register here to join us 3/26 and learn how Jenkins and Spinnaker cooperate for safe, scalable, maintainable software delivery.
A delivery engineer I spoke with last week said it best:
“I came from a world of using Jenkins to deploy. It’s great but, you’re just modifying Jenkins jobs. It can do a lot, but it’s like that line in Jurassic Park – ‘Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.’”
Many of us came from that world: we built delivery automation with scripts and tools like Jenkins, CircleCI, Bamboo, and TeamCity. We found configuration management, and used Puppet or Ansible to provision infrastructure in our pipelines as code. We became addicted to D.R.Y. (don’t repeat yourself), and there is no looking back.
Jenkins provides approachable automation of continuous integration steps. Spinnaker works with Jenkins to pick up and deliver build artifacts, and to delegate pipeline stages. As a true continuous delivery platform, Spinnaker codifies your unique software delivery culture and processes to your comfort level. It also adds production-ready value to your pipelines:
- Turnkey automation of advanced delivery strategies such as canary deployments
- One-click rollbacks
- Single pane of glass to view deployments, applications, server groups, clusters, load balancers, security groups, and firewalls
- Centralized API to automate and integrate across your toolchain
Jenkins taught us many lessons. It popularized the use of imperative pipelines to execute ordered steps in a SDLC. It taught us that centralizing delivery workflows into one platform makes strategic sense in scaling operations. At the same time, especially when used for deployments, it suffers from instability and maintenance overhead brought by unchecked plugin sprawl. It struggles to offer a scalable model for managing multiple jobs and distributed apps. But the way it consolidated SDLC tasks within a full-featured GUI empowered developer teams to start doing delivery.
In the new world of fast innovation through immutable infrastructure, Spinnaker has adapted that visibility to the realms of cloud and cloud native. It provides a centralized vantage point on all of your ephemerally-packaged applications, in their many variations. Within your pipelines, its guardrails identify invalid or non-compliant infrastructure before deployment even happens. Spinnaker’s smart delivery workflows insulate customers and end-users from impact to their software experience.
This sense of safety is Jenkins’ missing ingredient. Jenkins introduced a world where developers could independently chain together a path to production. It enabled us to improve our efficiency and code quality through testing and build automation, with self-service. This giant technological shift sparked a move away from waterfall development and ITIL-style delivery.
But, culture cannot change overnight. Developers who exercised this newfound power struck terror in the hearts of those accountable for availability and software-driven business goals. Culture lagged behind tooling, sparking fear and risk aversion. That fear still permeates many organizations, allowing baggage-free startups and the most nimble companies to digitally disrupt the status quo. These innovators prove that delivering highly valued interactions through software means increased profit and influence. Enter Armory Spinnaker.
Watch Armory CTO Isaac Mosquera’s Supercharge Your Deployments With Spinnaker and Jenkins presentation at CD Summit, or check out the longer version with Q&A at DeliveryConf.
Stop spending time and talent knitting your toolchain together with pipeline steps that rely on brittle, expensive-to-maintain scripts and repetitive GUI fiddles! Attend “I have Jenkins; why do I need Spinnaker?” to learn more about how Spinnaker can free your developers and evolve your continuous delivery game.
Originally posted on the Armory blog by Rosalind Benoit
I met Edgar Magana at Spinnaker Summit last year, when he spoke during Armory’s keynote as one of six Spinnaker champions. The energy and enthusiasm he brings to advocating for Spinnaker contrasts his intensity in approaching his role as operator of mega-scale cloud infrastructure. But, the more I get to know him, the more I understand that it’s one in the same. To enable Salesforce’s application owners to safely evolve software, he must ensure homogenous, predictable models for continuous delivery. Spinnaker has helped him make that a reality.
“Across multiple environments, we have to enable different models for Spinnaker based on security requirements,” he explains as he shares his standardization strategy.
“We templatize all the pipelines for consistency across services, with two types: EC2 instance deployments, and Kubernetes cluster pipelines. For Kubernetes, we require a lot of security hardening, and we need to use the same logging and monitoring mechanisms for all of our clusters.”
Every time Edgar’s team discovers a new configuration for Kubernetes, they upgrade that pipeline, which should trigger a service owner to relaunch the pipeline with new parameters, or sometimes, destroy their Kubernetes cluster and create a new one. “We make all these changes in development and staging first, of course,” he says, noting the dev, pre-prod, and prod Spinnaker instances his team maintains.
A security requirement that artifacts not be created in the same place that deploys services imposes an added complexity. It required Edgar’s team to innovate further, and split the baking process across two different Spinnaker instances. Luckily, they could configure this out of the box with Spinnaker by overriding parameters; Edgar appreciates that Spinnaker doesn’t hard-code a lot of configuration, as rigidity wouldn’t support Salesforce’s unique requirements. That has also allowed his team to create a “heavy layer of automation on top of Spinnaker,” providing guardrails for application owners.
Our conversation turns to the Spinnaker Ops SIG (Special Interest Group), which Edgar recently founded. A solid kickoff meeting produced several action items to be completed before the next scheduled meeting on February 27th at 10 AM, (always a good sign).
Most importantly at this stage, Edgar says:
“We want to reach out to more operators, people who are either struggling or evaluating Spinnaker. We need operators in different stages — super experts who control everything, like those at Netflix and Airbnb, operators that are getting there, like us at Salesforce, and those in the initial evaluation stage. The goal of the SIG is to have a place where operators can exchange use cases, and have a unified voice, just like other Spinnaker SIGs, and a path for specific features we want incorporated into Spinnaker. The community needed a place to discuss how to operate Spinnaker better. As an operator of large-scale infrastructure, I don’t want to share this system with only a few companies. We want to welcome new users and operators, and facilitate their transition from the POC (proof-of-concept) environment to the real thing. This will help us understand what kinds of features are more important.”
Does the Ops SIG also provide a place to vent and empathize? I sure hope so! “That’s the life of a cloud operations architect,” Edgar says when he has to reschedule our meeting, “we get called all the time, from account issues, to Spinnaker and Kubernetes configuration,” and lots more; indeed, once when I ping Edgar about this blog, he’s in a “war room” (boy, I sure don’t miss my Ops days right now!) But just like Armory, Edgar values empowering developers, and safely pushing control of applications and their infrastructure to the edge to fuel innovation. Better software is worth the hard work!
Another of Edgar’s goals for the Ops SIG: create reference architecture documentation for HA (high availability) and disaster recovery. “I want new users of Spinnaker to say, ‘I don’t need to reinvent the wheel; I’ll just follow these HA guidelines.” Architecture collateral will help Platforms and DevOps teams convince leadership that Spinnaker is a good investment for the company’s continuous delivery of software. This is where Edgar’s warm enthusiasm and operator’s intensity meet: empowering developers, empowering the community, empowering the planet.
I look forward to working more with Edgar and his team at Salesforce as part of the Ops SIG, our April Spinnaker Gardening Days online hackathon, and more. This is the kind of open-source heroism that will usher in the new industrial revolution!
Check out Edgar’s talk on Salesforce & Spinnaker from last winter’s Spinnaker Summit below, or hop over to the registration page for Armory’s upcoming, “I have Jenkins; why do I need Spinnaker?” webinar to reserve your spot!
712:23 PM – Nov 16, 2019Twitter Ads info and privacySee Edgar Magana’s other Tweets
Watch Edgar’s 8 minute talk, part of Isaac Mosquera’s keynote.:
Originally posted on the Armory blog by German Muzquiz
Spinnaker Operator is now Beta!
With Spinnaker Operator, define all the configurations of Spinnaker in native Kubernetes manifest files, as part of the Kubernetes kind “SpinnakerService” defined in its own Custom Resource Definition (CRD). With this approach, you can customize, save, deploy and generally manage Spinnaker configurations in a standard Kubernetes workflow for managing manifests. No need to learn a new CLI like Halyard, or worry about how to run that service.
The Spinnaker Operator has two flavors to choose from, depending on which Spinnaker you want to use: Open Source or Armory Spinnaker.
With the Spinnaker Operator, you can:
- Use “kubectl” to install and configure a brand new Spinnaker (OSS or Armory Spinnaker).
- Take over an existing Spinnaker installation deployed by Halyard and continue managing it with the operator going forward.
- Use Kustomize or Helm Charts to manage different Spinnaker installations with slight variations.
- Use Spinnaker profile files for providing service-specific configuration overrides (the equivalent of clouddriver-local.yml, gate-local.yml, etc.)
- Use Spinnaker service settings files to tweak the way Deployment manifests for Spinnaker microservices are generated.
- Use any raw files needed by configs in the SpinnakerService manifest (i.e. packer templates, support config files, etc.)
- Safely store secret-free manifests under source control, since a SpinnakerService manifest can contain references to secrets stored in S3, GCS or Vault (Vault is Armory Spinnaker only).
Additionally, Spinnaker Operator has some exclusive new features not available with other deployment methods like Halyard:
- Spinnaker secrets can be read from Kubernetes secrets.
- Spinnaker is automatically exposed with Kubernetes service load balancers (optional).
- Experimental: Accounts can be provisioned and validated individually by using a different SpinnakerAccount manifest, so that adding new accounts involves creating a new manifest instead of having everything in a single manifest.
Let’s look at an example workflow.
Assuming you have stored SpinnakerService manifests under source control, you have a pipeline in Spinnaker to apply these manifests automatically on source control pushes (Spinnaker deploying Spinnaker) and you want to add a new Kubernetes account:
- Save the kubeconfig file of the new account in a Kubernetes secret, in the same namespace where Spinnaker is installed.
- Checkout Spinnaker config repository from source control.
- Add a new Kubernetes account to the SpinnakerService manifest file, referencing the kubeconfig in the secret:
apiVersion: spinnaker.armory.io/v1alpha2
kind: SpinnakerService
metadata:
name: spinnaker
spec:
spinnakerConfig:
config:
version: 2.17.1 # the version of Spinnaker to be deployed
persistentStorage:
persistentStoreType: s3
s3:
bucket: acme-spinnaker
rootFolder: front50
+ providers:
+ kubernetes:
+ enabled: true
+ accounts:
+ - name: kube-staging
+ requiredGroupMembership: []
+ providerVersion: V2
+ permissions: {}
+ dockerRegistries: []
+ configureImagePullSecrets: true
+ cacheThreads: 1
+ namespaces: []
+ omitNamespaces: []
+ kinds: []
+ omitKinds: []
+ customResources: []
+ cachingPolicies: []
+ oAuthScopes: []
+ onlySpinnakerManaged: false
+ kubeconfigFile: encryptedFile:k8s!n:spinnaker-secrets!k:kube-staging-kubeconfig # secret name: spinnaker-secrets, secret key: kube-staging-kubeconfig
+ primaryAccount: kube-staging
- Commit the changes and open a Pull Request for review.
- Pull Request approved and merged.
- Automatically a Spinnaker pipeline runs and applies the updated manifest.
We hope that the Spinnaker Operator will make installing, configuring and managing Spinnaker easier and more powerful. We’re enhancing Spinnaker iteratively, and welcome your feedback.
Get OSS Spinnaker Operator (documentation)
Get Armory Spinnaker Operator (documentation)
Interested in learning more about the Spinnaker Operator? Reach out to us here or on Spinnaker Slack – we’d love to chat!
Originally posted on the Armory blog by Andrew Backes
Armory Has a Remote Work Culture
At Armory, we are intensely focused on building our culture, not just building our product. Our culture is the operating system of our company, underpinning and supporting everything that we do.
From the get-go, we decided that Armory’s culture was going to be designed with intentionality to be remote work friendly. Armory is built on Spinnaker, an open source project created by Netflix and Google. One of the incredible features of open source software is that it is built through the collaboration of talented individuals and teams distributed all over the world. To align with the vibrant Spinnaker open source community, we doubled down on building a strong remote work culture. Today, more than half of our company works remotely, with the remainder working at our HQ in San Mateo, CA.
What Does this Mean in Practice?
For many companies, the experience of remote workers is a secondary concern, if it is even thought of at all. But remote workers face their own unique experiences, benefits, and challenges. At Armory, we acknowledge and welcome this unique experience, approach it with empathy and understanding, and create feedback mechanisms to ensure that our on-site and remote tribals are all having the best possible experience.
Some of the things we do at Armory include:
- Set up Zoom stations all over the office to make it seamless to hop on a video chat and have synchronous, “face-to-face” communication
- This includes the always-on camera and screen in the main section of our office so that we can all eat lunch “together”
- Rotate meeting leadership between on-site and remote tribals, to continually ensure that the needs of remote tribals are being met
- Provide a flexible expense policy for remote workers to ensure that they have the best, most productive remote setup for their individual needs
- Organize frequent in-person events (team and company-wide offsites, holiday parties, the Spinnaker Summit, and others) to provide everyone with the opportunity for in-person relationship building
- Default to having conversations in a public Slack channel to ensure that everyone can participate, voice their perspectives, and share in the knowledge
- Create unstructured time for “high-bandwidth” communication (over Zoom and in-person) for people to get to know each other outside of a business context
- Specifically within the engineering team, many of the scrum teams dedicate a chunk of their daily standup time to the type of general team syncing and catch-up that happens more naturally in-person in the office
A high-risk moment for Armory! Most of the engineering team in one single elevator, on the way to dinner during a 3-day offsite. Everything turned out fine, and dinner was delicious.
Why Do We Invest in the Remote Experience?
All of these initiatives take time and effort. Why do we bother, instead of leaving it up to remote tribals to conform to the working cadence of the tribals who are at HQ?
One simple answer is that it comes down to people. We want to work with the best people all over the world, not just the best people in the Bay Area. And that means embracing remote work and maximizing the remote work experience.
For me personally, my main role as the Head of Engineering is to empower the engineering team. That means creating the visibility and shared context so that engineers have the information that they need to make great decisions to positively impact the company and the Spinnaker community. Furthermore, continual growth and improvement is a core value at Armory. It is imperative that each of us continue to learn and grow, not just in our technical depth but also in understanding how each other work, how we can function as a better, more cohesive team, and how we can strive together for larger goals.
If I am not investing in the right tools, processes, and culture to foster that shared context and continual growth across the entire engineering team, then I am not doing my job.
Armory is hiring polyglot engineers, as well as tribals across the entire organization. Check out open roles and learn more about what life is like at Armory at armory.io/careers. We’d love to hear from you!
Originally posted on the Armory blog, by Rosalind Benoit
“Let Google’s CloudBuild handle building, testing, and pushing the artifact to your repository. #WithSpinnaker, you can go as fast as you want, whenever you’re ready.”
Calling all infrastructure nerds, SREs, platforms engineers, and the like: if you’ve never seen Kelsey Hightower speak in person, add it to your bucket list. Last week, he gave a talk at Portland’s first Spinnaker meetup, hosted at New Relic by the amazing PDX DevOps GroundUp. I cackled and cried at the world’s most poignant ‘Ops standup’ routine. Of course, he thrilled the Armory tribe with his praise of Spinnaker’s “decoupling of high level primitives,” and I can share some key benefits that Kelsey highlighted:
- Even with many different build systems, you can consolidate deployments #withSpinnaker. Each can notify Spinnaker to pick up new artifacts as they are ready.
- Spinnaker’s application-centric approach helps achieve continuous delivery buy-in. It gives application owners the control they crave, within automated guardrails that serialize your software delivery culture.
- Building manual judgements into heavy deployment automation is a “holy grail” for some. #WithSpinnaker, we can end the fallacy of “just check in code and everything goes to prod.” We can codify the steps in between as part of the pipeline.
- Spinnaker uses the perfect integration point. It removes the brittleness of scripting out the transition between a ‘ready-to-rock’ artifact and an application running in production.
Kelsey’s words have profound impact. He did give some practical advice, like “Don’t run Spinnaker on the same cluster you’re deploying to,” and of course, keep separate build and deploy target environments. But the way Kelsey talked about culture struck a chord. We called the meetup, “Serializing culture into continuous delivery,” and in his story, Kelsey explained that culture is what you do: the actions you take as you work; your steps in approaching problems.
Yes, please!
I’m reminded of working on a team struggling with an “agile transformation” through a series of long, circular discussions. I urged my team, “Scrum is just something that you do!” You go to standups, and do demos. You get better at pointing work over time. The ceremonies matter because you adapt by doing the work.
Kelsey says his doing approach starts with raising his hand and saying, “I would like to own that particular problem,” and then figuring it out as he goes. Really owning a problem requires jumping in to achieve a deep understanding of it. It’s living it, and sharing with others who have lived it. We can BE our culture by learning processes hands-on, digging into the business reasons behind constraints, and using that knowledge to take ownership. Hiding behind culture talk doesn’t cut it, since you have to do it before you can change it.
“The return on investment is totally worth it”
Another important way of doing: recognizing when you don’t know how to do it and need some help. Powerful open source projects like Kubernetes and Spinnaker can become incredibly complicated to implement in a way that faithfully serializes your culture. Responsible ownership means getting the help you need to execute.
I love how Kelsey juxtaposed the theatrics and hero mythology behind change management and outage “war rooms” with the stark truth of the business needs behind our vital services. As Kelsey shared his Ops origins story, I recalled my own – the rocket launch music that played in my head the first time I successfully restarted the java process for an LMS I held the pager for, contrasted with the sick feeling I got when reading the complaining tweets from university students who relied on the system and had their costly education disrupted by the outage. I knew the vast majority of our students worked full time and paid their own way, and that many had families to juggle as I do. This was the real story of our work. It drove home the importance of continuous improvement, and meant that our slow-moving software delivery culture frustrated the heck out of me.
Kelsey’s LOL simulation of the Word doc deployment guide at his first “real” job. Got a deployment horror story about a Word-copied command with an auto-replaced en-dash on a flag not triggered until after database modification scripts had already run? I do!
So what do you do if you’re Kelsey? You become an expert at serializing a company’s decisions around software delivery and telling them, as a quietly functioning story, with the best-in-class open source and Google tooling of the moment. He tells the story of his first automation journey: “So I started to serialize culture,” he says, when most of the IT department left him to fend for himself over the winter holidays. Without trying to refactor applications, he set to work codifying the software delivery practices he had come to understand through Ops. He automated processes, using tools his team felt comfortable with.
He said, “We never walked around talking about all of our automation tools,” and that’s not a secrecy move, it’s his awareness of cognitive dissonance and cognitive overload. Because he had created a system based on application owners expectations, their comfort zone, he didn’t need to talk about it! It just worked (better and more efficiently over time, of course), and fulfilled the business case. Like Agile, this approach limits the scope of what one has to wrap their brain around to be excellent. Like Spinnaker, it empowers developers to focus on what they do best.
Instead of talking about the transformation you need, start by starting. Then change will begin.
Join Spinnaker Slack to learn more about Spinnaker and connect with folks who use and operate it. Read more about starting where you are, with what you have, or reach out to product@armory.io to set up a value stream mapping discovery day with experts from Armory and Continuity.
Spinnaker and Jenkins can cooperate to deliver software if that’s what makes sense in your culture.
Kelsey is a #legend for his techniques for getting people comfortable with new tools and automation!
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.
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 : )
Learn more in the spinnaker-hackathon/gardening README
