OES 3.6 is Generally Available with Simplified Spinnaker and Test Verification

Spinnaker continues to gain momentum in enterprises looking to modernize continuous delivery.  Spinnaker is the ideal CI/CD solution for flexible multi-cloud deployments (VM, containers, functions).  With OpsMx Enterprise for Spinnaker, we continue to make the adoption and use of Spinnaker more simple, and add intelligence to deliver updates more safely.

We are happy to announce our new release 3.6 that greatly simplifies deploying with Spinnaker and also extends our continuous verification capabilities to test use cases.  If you missed our previous release that introduced OpsMx Enterprise for Spinnaker Anywhere Agent, Informed Approval, and enhanced visibility features, check out the 3.5 release announcement blog.

List of new and improved features in the OES 3.6 release

Simplified Account Handling in Spinnaker

Spinnaker is a flexible CD platform that allows you to deploy to multiple clouds or clusters. In order for Spinnaker to deploy, you need to configure it so it is aware of your target clusters; you also need to configure Spinnaker to integrate with your other DevOps tools like Jenkins, Github, Jira, etc.

Currently, integrating new cloud provider accounts in Spinnaker is difficult, as there is no simple user interface. Similarly, connecting Spinnaker to your DevOps tool chain is cumbersome.  Both of these integrations involve using the Halyard CLI, which can be error-prone. In some cases, Spinnaker itself must be taken off line, preventing all updates, in order for the configuration to take effect.  

OpsMx Enterprise for Spinnaker (OES) 3.6 provides a simple integration process (called “account creation” in Spinnaker terms) that does not require restarting any Spinnaker services.  Figure 1 below shows a user adding a remote Kubernetes cluster (with a remote proxy agent) and Figure 2 shows a user adding an AWS account through the OES account creation process.  Note that it is possible to configure multiple Spinnaker instances through OES, which is especially useful in a multi-Spinnaker enterprise environment.

Figure 1: Adding a Remote Kubernetes Cluster as Cloud Provider via OES UI

Figure 2: Adding AWS Cloud Provider Account via OES UI

With OES 3.6, you can configure the following targets and DevOps tools using the OES UI. We plan to add additional integrations in upcoming releases.

• AWS

• GCP

• Azure

• Kubernetes (all flavors of Kubernetes: AKS, EKS, GKE, OpenShift, etc.)

• Jenkins

• Slack

• Git

• Jira

Automated Test Verification 

OpsMx Enterprise for Spinnaker enables you to automate the laborious process of determining the risk of all changes. You can use this unique OES capability to dramatically improve the risk assessment during application roll-out whether you are using canary, blue/green, or rolling updates. 

The industry has been trending towards evaluating software risk as early in the life cycle as possible with the “shift left” movement, and OES 3.6 now enables you to accelerate that trend. 

We are excited to announce that automated risk verification has been extended to include verification in the test stages, starting with OES 3.6.  Some software teams perform 100s or event 1000s of test cases during integration, performance and system testing.  Assessing risk during this testing is an arduous process and can easily take days.  When tests inevitably fail, you must determine the root cause of the issues or accept increased risk with the deployment. This process of diagnostics and triage adds significant delay to the process.

With our new test verification module, you can insert an automated verification gate in the Spinnaker pipeline that will be executed after a test suite has been completed. OES can plug into the test harness (whether you are using Selenium, JUnit, or others) and automatically evaluate the test results and analyze the log and metrics data from the test runs.

Figure 3: Summary Verification Status for Applications During Testing

We auto-analyze the data, calculate the risk, and highlight updates that are likely to cause problems. OES also allows users to quickly diagnose and attach the root cause. This diagnosed root cause tagging is used to quickly understand failures in future test runs, which leads to shorter test verification cycles overall. 

Figure 4: Detailed Risk Assessment Associated with Individual Test Cases 

For more information on OES 3.6, including information on corrected issues, please see the OES 3.6 Release Notes.

If you would like to see a demo of OES 3.6, please contact us. 

OpsMx is the provider of the OpsMx Enterprise for Spinnaker, the leading intelligent platform for software delivery. We help organizations safely deliver software at scale without human intervention. 

For additional information, please contact us.