Spinnaker Continuous Delivery for OpenShift Deployments
RedHat OpenShift is an enterprise-class Kubernetes distribution with enhancements around security and multi-tenant deployments for container applications. OpenShift is being used in several large Enterprises like Cisco, Barclay, Softbank, BMW, and Marriott.
Continuous Delivery in the Enterprise needs to support workflows that include common patterns like testing, static code analysis, coverage analysis etc. as part of the delivery workflow. Although native OpenShift offers some of the continuous deployment capabilities, it lacks comprehensive support for continuous delivery. OpenShift offers the ability to trigger deployments into OpenShift cluster using deployment config and image streams. These configurations are not standard Kubernetes constructs and offer limited support for continuous delivery. The following are some of the requirements of engineering organizations that need addressing to achieve a true continuous delivery for cloud-native applications:
- End-to-end workflow: To achieve a repeatable and automated continuous delivery, automation of software delivery from code-change to deployment to production is essential. The workflow could include approvals/verification/testing stages which need to be automated to achieve release velocity. Also, dev/ops team require visibility requirement of the application entire lifecycle allowing for process improvements and feedback.
- Ability to manage deploys to multiple OpenShift clusters: In a typical software delivery, artifacts needs to be deployed to dev/QA cluster followed by the staging cluster and eventually to production clusters. Ability to automate and sequence them and control the promotion between stages is key.
- Ability to perform audit/compliance checks: As applications roll-out to production, it becomes paramount to the organization to able to perform an audit of who deployed- what and when, and who approved the deployments.
Spinnaker is an open source multi-cloud continuous delivery tool that has been gaining mind share and uses among large enterprises like Cisco, Target, Cerner, Box etc. OpsMx offers OpsMx Enterprise for Spinnaker based on the Spinnaker OSS. Opsmx Enterprise for Spinnaker solves the challenges of the engineering team deploying to OpenShift for their dev/QA, staging, and production environments.
Open Enterprise Spinnaker provides the following benefits:
- Automated and Repeatable Deployments: Automate release with flexible pipeline builder and achieve composite application deployment.
- Easy Application Onboarding: Quickly onboard users and applications to the continuous delivery platform with self-service and easy to use templates with built-in best practices. Scale with advanced application template management.
- Smart Deploy: Out-of-the-box ability to deploy applications across on-prem and public cloud. Deploy applications with ready-to-use built-in deployment strategies such as blue/green, canary, rolling update or define your own custom strategy. Leverage automated analytics to decide to auto-rollback bad releases with one-click. Review the application’s health with a dashboard view of cluster and infrastructure in one pane.
- Automated Verification: Verify new software releases for suitability for production including reliability and business impact in an automated fashion during Canary or Red/Black or Rolling update or post-deployment in production. Automated verification minimizes production failures using advanced machine learning and statistical techniques (including Natual Language Processing (NLP)for log analysis) compared to error-prone and time-consuming manual analysis.
- Enterprise Security: Integrate into existing Enterprise security frameworks like LDAP/SAML to ensure RBAC for developers, operators, and teams.
Audit and Compliance: Automate audit and compliance verification and violation alerting and prevent non-compliance deployments with pre-defined compliant pipelines
For more information about OpsMx Enterprise for Spinnaker for OpenShift, contact us.
