Spinnaker Summit 2019 Recap – 5 Key Takeaways

Spinnaker Summit San Diego is officially in the books and what an event it was. I have been attending industry events for more than two decades, and I can honestly say this was one of the finest events. Kudos to the organizers and sponsors (including OpsMx, Netflix, Google, and Armory). The total number of attendees was over 500 (50% more than last year) which make it an intimate event but still large enough to get diverse perspective and participation by large Spinnaker users and enthusiast from around the world. For OpsMx, one of the leading providing of Spinnaker support, product, and services, this year event was a grand culmination of hard work of enabling numerous users (both large and small) with their adoption of Spinnaker. The OpsMx team tripled in size from the 20s to the 60s, and our customer base is now around the world. Here are my five key takeaways from the event which bodes well for any open source project and in this case Spinnaker:

1. Growth in Large Scale Adoptions: Spinnaker has been gaining adoption and interest in many large enterprises. This year’s event, we had users from Salesforce, Snap, Home Depot Hulu, Airbnb, Nike, Adobe, Pinterest, JPMC, Sony Playstation, Redbox, Autodesk, among others who shared their success stories. Add to last year’s list of enterprises, including Cisco. Namely, GogoAir, Capital One, Mulesoft, CenterEdge, Scopely and Schibsted and you can see why many Enterprises are looking at Spinnaker for their multi-cloud continuous delivery platform
2. Large and Collaborative Community: The Spinnaker community is rapidly growing, and now it has 8300+ users/contributors on the Spinnaker slack channel. Everyday 100s of conversations happen, and community members help each other out.
3. Accelerating Contributions: 30% of overall contribution occurred in the last year (38,903 of 128,444) again, a great statistic if you are evaluating the health of an open-source project. Importantly 50% of overall contributors contributed last year (1,147 of 2,417), which again indicates broad and robust code and community participation in the project.
4. Awareness to Implementation: Last year, the conversations were around users trying to understand whether Spinnaker is the right tool for their Continuous Delivery, and this year close to 200 people attended the various workshops on how to implement Spinnaker in their enterprises. It indicates that the users are convinced that the Spinnaker is the right tool and are starting the implementation. For next year, I expect to see even more user stores in production. This increasing adoption by new users is an excellent sign for the growth of any open source project.
5. New Features Expanding Further Adoption: Another great sign of the success of Spinnaker is the addition of amazing features that further distinguish Spinnaker from its alternatives. Three of my favorite additions are the following.
   1. Automated Verification feature expansion to include support for SignalFx and New Relic data sources. Automated Canary analysis is widely used with a lot of success at Pinterest, Nike, and Autodesk, among others. Michael Graff (co-creator of Kayenta) and I talked about the extension of automated verification beyond metrics to logs and APM and continuous verification by OpsMx and the creation of new SIG for operational validation.
   2. Plugin framework support will further make Spinnaker more widely applicable with the ability to plugin various eco-system tools to complete the SDLC.
   3. ECS and Lambda support by the AWS team enables Spinnaker to now fully support VMs, containers, and functions all in one continuous delivery tool.

I am very much looking forward to the Spinnaker Summit 2020 and to see the success of the Spinnaker community and user deployments. I will leave you with some of the pictures from the event. See you next year. https://twitter.com/balajisiva/status/1195515578330431489?s=20 https://twitter.com/SpinnakerSummit/status/1196119575890251776?s=20 https://twitter.com/GregChase/status/1195807847969251328?s=20 https://twitter.com/ops_mx/status/1196110755453640716?s=20 https://twitter.com/SpinnakerSummit/status/1196227269238198272?s=20 https://twitter.com/ops_mx/status/1196365965606436865?s=20