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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! 

Jenkins Celebrates 15 Years of Transforming Software Delivery

By Announcement

Jenkins Community Celebrates 15 years of Continuous Delivery Automation and Innovation at DevOps World | Jenkins World

DEVOPS WORLD | JENKINS WORLD, SAN FRANCISCO – AUGUST 14, 2019 – The Jenkins project, comprised of the community of practitioners using Jenkins®, today celebrated its 15th birthday at DevOps World | Jenkins World with a recap of milestones showcasing the community’s growth and the project’s defining impact on the global software industry.

Jenkins is the world’s leading open source automation server, used by companies large and small to implement continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD). Originally developed in 2004 and called Hudson, Jenkins’ impact has grown consistently over the years to the point where experts regularly describe Jenkins as the de facto tool for CI/CD.

So far this year, the Jenkins project has been a key driver in the formation of the Continuous Delivery Foundation, has continued to experience strong uptake in the use of Jenkins and will recognize key contributors to the Jenkins project around the globe during Thursday’s keynote session at DevOps World | Jenkins World.

In establishing the Continuous Delivery Foundation, the Jenkins community worked with The Linux Foundation, CloudBees, Google and Netflix to create a new foundation for the diverse CI/CD space. In addition to Jenkins, the Continuous Delivery Foundation was established with several other CI/CD open source projects, including Jenkins X, Spinnaker and Tekton. It serves as a vehicle to develop, nurture and promote open source projects, best practices and industry specifications related to continuous delivery.

The Continuous Delivery Foundation fosters vendor-neutral collaboration between the industry’s top developers, end users and vendors to further CI/CD best practices and industry specifications. Its mission is to grow and sustain projects that are part of the broad and growing continuous delivery ecosystem.

“This has been a great year for Jenkins, the Continuous Delivery Foundation and open source collaboration as a whole,” said Chris Aniszczyk, vice president at the Linux Foundation. “We all share a common mission – to support community-based development of projects that advance the state of software delivery. The Jenkins project has been squarely behind this effort from day one and today the community is stronger than ever.”

Also playing a key role in Jenkins’ transition to the CDF was CloudBees’ Tracy Miranda. Miranda took on the dual roles of CloudBees director of open source community and member of the governing board of the CDF. “CD is becoming a differentiator for organizations in every industry, yet adoption remains challenging. It’s an industry-wide problem that needs an industry-wide solution. From the CloudBees perspective, we see it as critical to have a neutral foundation where all agents of change can collaborate and contribute openly,” said Miranda. “Looking ahead to the next 15 years, we need to solve the complexity of CD adoption. With the CDF, we are well-equipped to do this in open source – building on top of all that we have learned in the Jenkins community over the years.”

During the period from July 1, 2018, through June 30, 2019, the Jenkins project achieved these milestones:

  • 46% growth in active Jenkins installations1 reporting usage data was in the period August 1, 2018 – July 31, 2019
    The community experienced approximately 46 percent growth in active installations, reaching 265,956 installations as of July 31, 2019, compared to 182,236 installations as of August 1, 2018. Active installations are defined as Jenkins instances that report usage information back to the Jenkins project. This number is not representative of the total Jenkins instances in use worldwide; that number is significantly greater.
  • Approximately 15.8 million Jenkins developers
    A recent Datanyze analysis of the CI vendor landscape showed that about 66 percent of continuous integration is being run on Jenkins. With an estimated 24 million developers, globally, according to Evans Data in its 2019 Global Developer Population and Demographics Study, approximately 15.8 million developers are using Jenkins.
  • 254% growth in Jenkins Pipeline jobs
    Finally, the combined number of defined Jenkins jobs increased during this same period from 19,946,119 in July 2018 to 30,281,905, or 52 percent growth. Specifically, Jenkins Pipeline jobs grew 254 percent in the same period. The dramatic growth in Jenkins Pipeline jobs demonstrates that organizations are accelerating their investment in modern software pipeline automation practices with Jenkins.

“Over the past 15 years, the Jenkins project has revolutionized the way software is built and delivered,” said Jenkins creator Kohsuke Kawaguchi, who also serves as chief scientist at CloudBees. “We have touched every industry and made a difference to every software team in the world.”

Additional Resources

1The Jenkins community tracks statistics from active Jenkins installations that transmit usage information back to the project. The numbers do not represent a majority of Jenkins installations, only those who choose to report. Therefore, the numbers are conservative.

About the Continuous Delivery Foundation
Continuous delivery (CD) is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time. The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) is a Linux Foundation initiative that serves as the vendor-neutral home for many of the fastest-growing projects, including Jenkins, Jenkins X, Spinnaker, and Tekton. The CDF fosters collaboration between the industry’s top developers, end users and vendors to further continuous delivery best practices. For more information about the CDF, please visit https://cd.foundation.

Spinnaker Sets Sail to the Continuous Delivery Foundation

By Blog, Staff

By Andy Glover, Director of Delivery Engineering, at Netflix

This is a contributed Blog from our Premier founding member Netflix on the donation of Spinnaker to CDF. Originally Posted on the Netflix Technology Blog.

Since releasing Spinnaker to the open source community in 2015, the platform has flourished with the addition of new cloud providers, triggers, pipeline stages, and much more. A myriad new features, improvements, and innovations have been added by an ever growing, actively engaged community. Each new innovation has been a step towards an even better Continuous Delivery platform that facilitates rapid, reliable, safe delivery of flexible assets to pluggable deployment targets.

Over the last year, Netflix has improved overall management of Spinnaker by enhancing community engagement and transparency. At the Spinnaker Summit in 2018, we announced that we had adopted a formalized project governance plan with Google. Moreover, we also realized that we’ll need to share the responsibility of Spinnaker’s direction as well as yield a level of long-term strategic influence over the project so as to maintain a healthy, engaged community. This means enabling more parties outside of Netflix and Google to have a say in the direction and implementation of Spinnaker.

A strong, healthy, committed community benefits everyone; however, open source projects rarely reach this critical mass. It’s clear Spinnaker has reached this special stage in its evolution; accordingly, we are thrilled to announce two exciting developments.

First, Netflix and Google are jointly donating Spinnaker to the newly created Continuous Delivery Foundation (or CDF), which is part of the Linux Foundation. The CDF is a neutral organization that will grow and sustain an open continuous delivery ecosystem, much like the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (or CNCF) has done for the cloud native computing ecosystem. The initial set of projects to be donated to the CDF are Jenkins, Jenkins X, Spinnaker, and Tekton. Second, Netflix is joining as a founding member of the CDF.  Continuous Delivery powers innovation at Netflix and working with other leading practitioners to promote Continuous Delivery through specifications is an exciting opportunity to join forces and bring the benefits of rapid, reliable, and safe delivery to an even larger community.

Spinnaker’s success is in large part due to the amazing community of companies and people that use it and contribute to it. Donating Spinnaker to the CDF will strengthen this community. This move will encourage contributions and investments from additional companies who are undoubtedly waiting on the sidelines. Opening the doors to new companies increases the innovations we’ll see in Spinnaker, which benefits everyone.

Donating Spinnaker to the CDF doesn’t change Netflix’s commitment to Spinnaker, and what’s more, current users of Spinnaker are unaffected by this change. Spinnaker’s previously defined governance policy remains in place. Overtime, new stakeholders will emerge and play a larger, more formal role in shaping Spinnaker’s future. The prospects of an even healthier and more engaged community focused on Spinnaker and the manifold benefits of Continuous Delivery is tremendously exciting and we’re looking forward to seeing it continue to flourish.  

Introducing the Continuous Delivery Foundation, the new home for Tekton, Jenkins, Jenkins X and Spinnaker

By Blog, Staff

By Dan Lorenc and Kim Lewandowski, DevOps at Google Cloud

This is a contributed blog from our Premier founding member Google on the donation of Tekton and Spinnaker to CDF. Originally published on the Google Open Source Blog.

We’re excited to announce that Google is a founding member of the newly formed Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF). Continuous delivery (CD) is a critical part of modern software development and DevOps practices, and we’re excited to collaborate in a vendor-neutral foundation with other industry leaders.

We’re also thrilled to announce the contribution of two projects as part of our membership: Tekton, and in collaboration with Netflix, Spinnaker. These donations will enter alongside Jenkins and Jenkins X, providing an exciting portfolio of projects for the CDF to expand upon.

Continuous Delivery Foundation

Currently, the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) tool landscape is highly fragmented. As companies migrate to the cloud and modernize their infrastructure, tooling decisions become increasingly complicated and difficult. DevOps practitioners constantly seek guidance on software delivery best practices and how to secure their software supply chains but gathering this information can be difficult. Enter the CDF.

The CDF is about more than just code. Modern application development brings new challenges around security and compliance. This foundation will work to define the practices and guidelines that, together with tooling, will help application developers everywhere deliver better and more secure software at speed.

At a foundation level, the CDF will help make CI/CD tooling easier. And at a project level, Tekton helps address complexity problems at their core. We will team up with the open source community and industry leaders to design and build the critical pieces common to CI/CD systems.

Tekton

Tekton is a set of shared, open source components for building CI/CD systems. It provides a flexible, extensible workflow that accommodates deployment to Kubernetes, VMs, bare metal, mobile or even emerging use cases.

The project’s goal is to provide industry specifications for pipelines, workflows, source code access and other primitives. It modernizes the continuous delivery control plane by leveraging all of the built-in scaling, reliability, and extensibility advantages of Kubernetes, and moves software deployment logic there. Tekton was initially built as a part of Knative, but given its stand-alone power, and ability to deploy to a variety of targets, we’ve decided to separate its functionality out into a new project.

Today, Tekton includes primitives for pipeline definition, source code access, artifact management, and test execution. The project roadmap includes adding support for results and event triggering in the coming months. We also plan to work with CI/CD vendors to build out an ecosystem of components that will allow you to use Tekton with existing tools like Jenkins X, Knative and others.

Spinnaker

Spinnaker is an open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform originally created by Netflix and jointly led by Netflix and Google. It is typically used in organizations at scale, where DevOps teams support multiple development teams, and has been battle-tested in production by hundreds of teams and in millions of deployments.

Spinnaker is a multi-component system that conceptually aligns with Tekton, and that includes many features important to making continuous delivery reliable, including support for advanced deployment strategies, and Kayenta, an open source canary analysis service.

Given Google’s significant contributions to both Tekton and Spinnaker, we’re very pleased to see them become part of the same foundation. Spinnaker’s large user community has a great deal of experience in the continuous delivery domain, and joining the CDF provides a great opportunity to share that expertise with the broader community.

Next Steps

To learn more about the CDF, listen to this week’s Kubernetes Podcast from Google, where the guest is Tracy Miranda, Director of Open Source Community from our partner CloudBees.

If you’d like to participate in the future of Tekton, Spinnaker, or the CDF, please join us in Barcelona, Spain, on May 20th at the Continuous Delivery Summit ahead of KubeCon/CloudNativeCon EU. If you can’t make it, don’t worry, as there will be many opportunities to get involved and become a part of the community.

We look forward to working with the continuous delivery community on shaping the next wave of CI/CD innovations, alignments, and improvements, no matter where your applications are delivered to.