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Apr 27
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From Armory – The World of Jenkins: Better #withSpinnaker

By Blog, Member
Jenkins and Spinnaker, Better Together

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.

Apr 27
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From Armory – Kubernetes Native: Introducing Spinnaker Operator

By Blog, Member

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:

  1. Save the kubeconfig file of the new account in a Kubernetes secret, in the same namespace where Spinnaker is installed.
  2. Checkout Spinnaker config repository from source control.
  3. 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
  1. Commit the changes and open a Pull Request for review.
  2. Pull Request approved and merged.
  3. 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!

Apr 09
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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!

Apr 07
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From Armory – Kelsey Hightower on Spinnaker: Culture is what you DO

By Blog, Member

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. 

Is Spinnaker The Hard Way coming?

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. 

Tweets: Spinnaker is complex, but the return on investment is totally worth 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 Deployment Guide Doc

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. 

Tweets: Spinnaker and Jenkins

Spinnaker and Jenkins can cooperate to deliver software if that’s what makes sense in your culture.

Tweet: I learned so much from Kelsey's talk on Spinnaker

Kelsey is a #legend for his techniques for getting people comfortable with new tools and automation!

Mar 16
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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
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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!

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

By Blog, Community

By Tracy Ragan, CEO DeployHub, CD Foundation Board Member

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

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

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

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

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

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

The full recorded demo is here:

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

https://github.com/louisvernon/SpinnakerSummit2019

Jan 27
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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! 

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