GoCD vs. Helm vs. Spinnaker

Previously, our team used Jenkins. However, since it's a shared deployment resource we don't have admin access. We tried GoCD as it's open source and we really like. We set up our deployment pipeline to run whenever codes are merged to master, run the unit test and revert back if it doesn't pass. Once it's deployed to the staging environment, we can simply do 1-click to deploy the appropriate version to production. We use this to deploy to an on-prem server and also AWS. Some deployment pipelines use custom Powershell script for.Net application, some others use Bash script to execute the docker push and cloud formation template to build elastic beanstalk.

Incentivized

If you need to automate the deployment of environments in Kubernetes and these environments should be easily replicable in other regions of your cloud provider or even in other cloud providers, then this is the tool for you. Just be prepared for a certain degree of complexity when creating the charts.

Incentivized

Spinnaker suits well for applications which are stateless and can adapt to an immutable architecture of deployment. But for applications which are stateful and cannot afford to spin up new servers for every deployment doesn't go well with Spinnaker. It can handle only deployments which are VM based and cannot support deployments to serverless architecture like AWS Lambda etc.

Incentivized

• Pipeline-as-Code works really well. All our pipelines are defined in yml files, which are checked into SCM.
• The ability to link multiple pipelines together is really cool. Later pipelines can declare a dependency to pick up the build artifacts of earlier ones.
• Agents definition is really great. We can define multiple different kinds of environments to best suit our diverse build systems.

Incentivized

• Templates - The ability to create templates is really helpful and help creates a baseline for package management.
• Rollbacks - it is godsend. Period.
• Dry-run - This really is helpful when troubleshooting deployments and is great for testing out new charts as well.

Incentivized

• Fast deployments.
• Can be integrated with a good variety of other products.
• Also provides some insights from your environment.

Incentivized

• UI can be improved
• Location for settings can be re-arranged
• API for setting up pipeline

Incentivized

• concurrent deployments
• templating values files

Incentivized

• It does NOT support CFN based deployments
• Windows based systems finds it difficult to onboard to Spinnaker.
• Pipeline level access authorisation is not there.
• Support for EBS volume encryption is probably missing.
• Attach/detach EBS volumes during deployments is difficult.
• No support to deploy the artifacts without re-creating the servers. Only pure immutable deployment are allowed.
• Open-source - so good and bad!
• Spinnaker on its own has 10 underlying micro services. Managing Spinnaker needs a focussed platform approach.
• User authentication is easy but authorisation management is not straight forward.

Incentivized

We didn't really need support, but the open-source community seemed responsive and informative when it came to issues. Many cloud native consultancy companies (including ourselves) offer support for Helm.

Incentivized

GoCD is easier to setup, but harder to customize at runtime. There's no way to trigger a pipeline with custom parameters.

Jenkins is more flexible at runtime. You can define multiple user-provided parameters so when user needs to trigger a build, there's a form for him/her to input the parameters.

Incentivized

We have a natural trending to use what is a reference in its space and Helm has being leader in its area for a long time. Since it has all features we need didn't make sense to us to invest time on researching and testing other alternatives, so Helm was our first and only tool in regards of automating deployments on Kubernetes

Incentivized

• Pipeline Expressiveness • Self-Service/Override • Visibility of Client Teams • Operability of Client Teams - • High-Quality Integrations (AWS, IHP, Google) • Extensibility – (Ability to add code) • The maturity of Deployment Process • Speed/Ease of Onboarding

Incentivized

• ROI has been good since it's open source
• Settings.xml need to be backed up periodically. It contains all the settings for your pipelines! We accidentally deleted before and we have to restore and re-create several missing pipelines
• More straight forward use of API and allows filtering e.g., pull all pipelines triggered after this date

Incentivized

• Reduction in human effort.
• Streamline software versions and upgrades.

Incentivized

• By using Spinnaker we are able to deploy new versions of our product quickly.
• A deployment takes in average 2 minutes.
• Our investment on Spinnaker was just time learning it.

Incentivized