3Ss of Spinnaker: Scalable, Simple and Safe
1. Large scale adoption of Spinnaker
We all have witnessed the ubiquitous growth of the Internet in the last few decades. Today, the Internet “connects every device” that runs software. Similarly, a declarative application delivery platform will “deliver software to any device”.
As we work with enterprises to transform their software delivery, we see three fundamental pillars through which Spinnaker can become a ubiquitous platform: Scalable, Simple & Safe
2. What does it mean for Spinnaker to be Scalable, Simple and Safe?
Scalable: Spinnaker should be to be able to deliver applications in diverse enterprise environments. This means Spinnaker must be able to scale to support: 1. Delivery of heterogeneous Applications including microservices and monoliths, 2. with diverse Compliance and security environments, 3. onto Cloud, Container, and Bare-metal infrastructures, and Edge-devices, 4. in organizations with diverse culture, process, and requirements.
Simple: As Scalability increases, complexity tends to increase. In order for large enterprises to achieve enterprise-wide usage and small enterprises to adopt Spinnaker with minimal effort, Simplification is necessary. This means 1. easy to deploy Spinnaker and manage spinnaker, 2. provide self-service onboarding of applications and users with policy and compliance, and 3. easy to deliver applications and operate them.
Safe: As speed and scale of releases and deployments increase, any small error could turn into a business-impacting disaster, be it security, compliance, functionality or performance problems. Ensuring safety and reliability is very critical at these speeds and scale.
2.1 Achieving Scalable Spinnaker
2.1.1 Microservices and Monoliths
Most enterprises have a healthy mix of microservices and monoliths. Although application transformation is underway towards microservices, this transformation will take time and effort. However, a lot of enterprises that have the majority of their applications as monoliths as shown below:
OpsMx works with enterprises to enable continuous delivery for both monoliths and microservices. For example, to deliver stateful applications such as Databases, Delivery Custom Stage was created and currently supports MySQL, PostgreSQL and will support Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle. We migrate workflows from platforms such as IBM UDeploy.
2.1.2 Compliance and security environments
Enterprises have diverse Compliance and Security needs. OpsMx works with enterprises to meet their diverse Compliance and Security requirements, by providing an underlying platform with fine-grain authorization controls, and pipeline creation/config-time and run-time/execution-time policy enforcement. We also bring templatized best-practices that work for specific industries and provide comprehensive Audit trailing to work in very demanding compliance environments.
2.1.3 Cloud, Container, Serverless, and Bare-metal infrastructures, & Edge-devices
Delivering to all sorts of devices is going to be a lot of fun. We are excited about our Baremetal delivery framework and as part of that open-sourced Terraform Stage and are in the process of the Ansible stage.
Spinnaker community and OpsMx provides best practices for various organizations. That is the power of the Community!!
2.2 Achieving Simple & Easy-to-use Spinnaker
Small and large enterprises need simplicity to adopt Spinnaker with minimal effort and to achieve enterprise-wide usage. In order to make Spinnaker Easy to deploy & manage OpsMx worked with enterprises to provide Red Hat Certified Spinnaker Operator for regulatory environments, and Kubernetes Operator to make it easy to manage life-cycle of Spinnaker.
In addition, enterprises use extensions for Self-service onboarding of Applications & Users, and Easy to deliver and operate Applications.
2.3 Achieving Safe & Reliable Spinnaker
As speed and scale of releases and deployments increase, any small error could turn into a business-impacting disaster, be it security, compliance, functionality or performance problems. OpsMx has worked with enterprises to provide extensions to ensure safe delivery and safe operations.
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3. Looking Ahead
It is very exciting to look ahead and wonder how Spinnaker will transform enterprises and will be transformed in the process. With all of you as fellow community travelers in this Journey, I am sure we will all look back 5 to 10 years from now and see the transformation we have been part of and relish the shared experiences.
Happy Holidays!! Look forward to seeing all of you soon!!
