Spinnaker for AWS Continuous Delivery and AMI restacking!
May 21, 2018

Spinnaker for AWS Continuous Delivery and AMI restacking!

Debajit Kataki | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Spinnaker

We use Spinnaker for continuous delivery in AWS and AWS AMI re-staking!
  • Spinnaker is very strong in its ability to baking of AMI(with ROSCO) and code deployments for Linux based ec2/AMI. Below are some more points:
  • Out of the box deployment strategies.
  • Open Source and active development.
  • Multi cloud deployments ( also can integrate with kubernetes)
  • Automated triggers.
  • Manual Judgements.
  • In-house bakery service, which helps in immutable deployments.
  • Easy pipeline setups using the UI , no need to write complex CFNs for code deployments.
  • "One click resize" of the underlying ec2s.
  • Exactly "one click rollback".
  • Pipelines can be scripted (SPEL)
  • Excellent search feature to search LBs , clusters etc from the UI.
  • Both high level and low level view of clusters, which has fine-grained options to control cloud infra from Spinnaker UI itself.
  • SSO and RBAC supported.
  • Wide range of deployment strategies like Blue-Green , Highlanders etc.
  • 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.
  • It's open source!
  • RPM based deployments can be scripted at Maven file itself , so very easy!
  • RPM based deployments bundles all code and configs together, so awesome!
We get a centralised view of all pipelines in single place. This helps for a large enterprise. Maven is very popular, so generating RPM from existing POM.xml is cool!
We find Spinnaker a very useful tool, primarily due to the below reasons:

  1. Out of the box deployment strategies.
  2. Open Source and active development.
  3. Multi-cloud deployments ( also can integrate with k8s )
  4. Automated triggers.
  5. Manual Judgements.
  6. In-house bakery service, which helps in immutable deployments.
  7. Easy pipeline setups using the UI, no need to write complex CFNs for code deployments.
  8. "One click resize" of the underlying ec2s.
  9. Exactly "one-click rollback".
  10. Pipelines can be scripted. (SPEL)
  11. Excellent search feature to search LBs, clusters etc from the UI.
  12. Both high level and low-level view of clusters, which has fine-grained options to control cloud infra from Spinnaker UI itself.
  13. SSO and RBAC supported.
  14. Wide range of deployment strategies like Blue-Green, Highlanders etc.