Extend Spinnaker to Make Your Existing Software Delivery Tooling More Valuable
Jun 25, 2020
by DROdio
Spinnaker is more than a Continuous Delivery tool. It’s a Software Delivery Platform, now with a Plugin Framework that extends Spinnaker’s value across your Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC).
Spinnaker’s extensibility is at the core of Armory’s Software Delivery Collaboration Platform. Armory provides enterprise-grade functionality that enables Software Delivery Collaboration from Code to Cloud and makes the existing tooling in your SDLC work together more seamlessly, multiplying the value you get from your existing investments.
I caught up with the Armory Plugin, OSS and Partner teams to discuss Spinnaker’s new Plugin framework:
In the video we cover:
How Spinnaker is evolving into a “Lean Core, Fat Ecosystem” platform via this Plugin framework
How Plugins work with Spinnaker, and what value they provide both Global 2,000 enterprises with custom needs, as well as the entire SDLC ecosystem
Examples of Armory, Spinnaker and SDLC ecosystem-built Plugins (also detailed below)
Nomad Support: This Plugin allows Spinnaker to deploy containers to a Hashicorp Nomad environment, extending Spinnaker’s reach to Hashicorp’s customers.
This is a significant extension for Spinnaker, as it’s the first Spinnaker CloudDriver built as a plugin, decoupling the code from the rest of the Spinnaker code base. This makes it easier and faster for the Spinnaker community and cloud provider integrators to add, update, and maintain Spinnaker CloudDrivers
Change Management: This integration updates internal business workflows with automated Jira ticket changes as your workloads are promoted through Spinnaker pipelines to production
Use Spinnaker’s rich expression language to inject data like the user who kicked off the pipeline, the Git commit hash, and other relevant information from the pipeline into the ticket
Provision Infrastructure: This Plugin deploys and runs Pulumi, an Infrastructure as Code tool that provisions AWS, GCP, and Kubernetes resources with code in your language of choice. Users of this plugin won’t need to leave the Spinnaker UI to interact with Pulumi and see output of its resource actions; it’s all integrated
Chaos Engineering: This integration automates chaos experiments by adding a Gremlin stage to your delivery pipelines using the Spinnaker interface. This integration ensures that infrastructure and code is deployed in a resilient way, and that your application will be up and ready to accept customers even if your infrastructure has issues.
Splunk integration enables actionable insights
Actionable Insights: Spinnaker can be configured to output its powerful data set to Splunk to generate actionable insights and automated software rollbacks from within Splunk.
This integration features bidirectional communication between Spinnaker and Splunk, allowing Splunk to monitor and show alerts, and to take actions based on Spinnaker health and data, and for Spinnaker to take action based on Splunk data, even from other systems of record.
Powerful dashboarding: Dynamic, real-time dashboards for at-a-glance visibility into the health and status of your cloud, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud application pipelines.
Pipeline Monitoring & Alerting: Proactively highlight your deployment process throughout the CI/CD pipeline, uncover deployment issues throughout your organization, and provide insights for troubleshooting and root cause analysis.
DevOps Insights: Critical insights to identify bottlenecks and direct resources to the teams and individuals that need them the most.
Monitor Blue/Green Deployments on Cloud Foundry: Use Concourse for building the microservices of the Dynatrace Sockshop and then Spinnaker to deliver the build artifacts to a staging and production space
Policy Management: Styra has built functionality to manage Armory Policy Engine rules for Open Policy Agent.
This integration allows for policies to be created, tested, validated, distributed and managed to Styra’s OPA endpoints, ensuring that Armory’s Policy Engine rules are deployed in with consistency and repeatability.
Armory Policy Engine plugin allows Spinnaker users to leverage Armory’s Policy Engine, based on Open Policy Agent
Enable DevSec collaboration: Armory’s Policy Engine builds on the popular Open Policy Agent open source project
Write simple rules in code to enforce company policies for security and compliance
Automate the enforcement of these codified policies with Spinnaker
Execution features allow policies to be run before and after pipeline stages, and Persistence features allow policies to be evaluated when a pipeline is saved
Increase observability: This Plugin enables customizing and tweaking the Micrometer registry
Exposes an OpenMetrics endpoint for the Micrometer/Spectator metrics
This allows tools such as Prometheus or the New Relic OpenMetrics integration to work without the Spinnaker Monitoring Daemon
Armory is open-sourcing this Plugin to the Spinnaker community
Armory Kubernetes Agent plugin allows Spinnaker scalability in Kubernetes
Spinnaker in large scale Kubernetes environments: Armory’s Kubernetes Agent leverages Kubernetes’ ability to watch changes and keep a “real-time” view of your infrastructure with minimum resource utilization.
Empowered developers: Many organizations want to offer a self-service way to provision new Kubernetes clusters. By adding Kubernetes agents to all new clusters, you can ensure these clusters are automatically discovered in Spinnaker and enforce guardrails.
Easier account management: Spinnaker operators do not need to know credentials. The operation team controls what Spinnaker has access to.
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