What is Spinnaker?

Spinnaker is a multi-cloud continuous delivery platform for releasing software changes. It is designed to increase release velocity and reduce the risk associated with updating applications. Spinnaker is used in production by thousands of organizations around the world to automate their software delivery process, and used by developers, testers, SREs to deploy hundreds of changes a day.

Spinnaker is supported by a large community including AWS, Google, Azure, Oracle, SAP, Cisco, Netflix, etc. Spinnaker is a Linux Foundation project, and CD Foundation executes the product roadmap and strategic initiatives.

Spinnaker Features

Multicloud deployment

Use Spinnaker to deploy applications (containers, VM, or functions) to the public cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure) or private cloud ( like Openshift). Deploy Kubernetes apps seamlessly as Spinnaker treats Kubernetes as a first-class citizen.

Automated pipelines

Automate your release with a flexible pipeline builder in Spinnaker to automate the CI/CD workflow and deliver multi-service composite applications into target environments without writing any scripts.

Pipeline-as-code

Use existing pipeline JSON files to recreate and configure application delivery workflows. Leverage pipeline as code to insert fine grained policies and improve visibility during the pipeline execution.

Deployment Verification

Deploy applications with ready-to-use built-in safe deployment strategies in Spinnaker. Spinnaker native supports blue/green, canary, rolling update, and lets you define your custom strategy. Spinnaker also provides the ability to roll back bad deployments with one click or even automatically.

Automated Canary Analysis

Perform automated canary analysis in Spinnaker pipeline by collecting metrics from monitoring tools. You extend the capability to calculate risk of any update in each stage of delivery by analyzing build logs, metrics, or test data.

Notifications

Notify your stakeholders about the deployment status of your update. Integrate notification tools of your choice, including email, Slack, Twilio, Servicenow, HipChat, Microsoft Teams, and more.

Security

Embed authentication and authentication by integrating Spinnaker with tools such as OAuth, SAML, LDAP, X.509 certs, Google Groups, Azure Groups, or GitHub Teams. Store your sensitive information using Spinnaker integration with 3rd party secret management tools like Hashicorp Vault.

Flexibility and Extensibility

With open source Spinnaker, it is easy to customise and extend any capability as per your organization requirements. You can build connectors for external services or tools, or add new UI widgets.

API based

Spinnaker is modular and can act as a central CD tool for many enterprises because it uses an API-based architecture. Developers across the team can integrate external services with Spinnaker services.

How Does Spinnaker Fit into your CI/CD Tool Chain?

Spinnaker can integrate with any CI/CD tools in your environment. It complements CI tools such as Jenkins and Travis CI by orchestrating the entire deployment pipeline, including invoking the CI tools, fetching the artifacts they create, and deploying the final package into the target environments.
Learn more details about Spinnaker integrations.

Increase release velocity

Both the speed of each update, and the time required to prepare to promote an update, are dramatically reduced when you use Spinnaker. This has enabled many organizations to increase their cadence by 10x.

Cut costs

By improving the utilization of infrastructure, reducing the number of errors found in production, and by increasing the productivity of developers, testers, and SREs, Spinnaker generates significant cost savings.

Reduce Risk

Both the speed of each update, and the time required to prepare to promote an update, are dramatically reduced when you use Spinnaker. This has enabled many organizations to increase their cadence by 10x.

Create a seamless CI/CD process

Spinnaker can integrate with CI tools, like Jenkins, and on the completion of the build process, trigger a pipeline to fetch artefacts from repositories (like Docker HUB) and deploy into a test, staging, or production environment. Spinnaker can notify post deployment health status of application to all stakeholders.

Deploy applications and infrastructure changes ondemand

With the Spinnaker pipeline you can deploy application changes and infrastructure changes into the target environment on demand. You can deploy infrastructure updates using a manifest YAML as text, or by specifying new artifacts like a Docker Image, AMI or a file stored in GitHub. Further, Spinnaker can provision infrastructure in AWS, GCP or others using Terraform scripts in the pipeline.

GitOps style deployment or managed delivery

Apart from the ability to deploy using pipelines through defining stages, Spinnaker also offers declarative delivery models also known as GitOps style deployment or managed delivery. You can declare the desired state of your infrastructure resources like security groups, load balancers, and clusters in YAML files in Git and trigger Spinnaker pipeline to submit YAML changes to the Spinnaker API. Spinnaker will then manage the deployment process for you.