#opsmx spinnaker

Kayenta is the Spinnaker microservice that is responsible for enabling canary deployments in Spinnaker and performing automated canary analysis. Canary deployment is a release deployment strategy where a new release version is deployed alongside the stable running version.

It is exposed to a small subset of the end-users and then evaluated against the baseline (a copy of current deployment) to find out if the new release is stable and ready to be rolled out. The application config in Spinnaker has the configuration option to activate canary config and canary reports on Deck.

Kayenta supports monitoring tools like Stackdriver, Prometheus, Datadog, New Relic, e.t.c. Performing automated canary analysis with Kayenta involves two stages — Metric Retrieval and Judgement. Key metrics are retrieved from canary and baseline clusters, tagged, and stored in a time-series database.

As you develop your spring boot applications you will need to deploy and deliver them into production environments using a series of steps that include build, test, package, bake, and deploy. The builds are created and tested using Jenkins CI.

Using Netflix Nebula Gradle plugins you can create Debian packages containing the executable JAR and configuration files. Using Spinnaker you can bake these build files and progress your release through testing,staging and production.

Kubernetes is the leading container management and orchestration platform where you can deploy your microservice-based cloud-native applications ( K8S, GKE, EKS, AKS). It offers automated bin packing, scaling & self-healing containers, service discovery, and load balancing.

With the ongoing thrust for digital transformation, today more organizations are opting for Kubernetes as a part of their transformation journey. But there are several challenges that remain to be addressed in the way of the Kubernetes adoption like — deployment complexities and use of scripts, overdependence on experts and burnouts, dealing with security challenges, and deployment strategies and post-deployment health checks.

Top 4 Challenges for Broad Spinnaker Success

Spinnaker adoption can often be difficult, and updating the software delivery process, brings with it some complexity and potential for error. Still every company today must transform their software delivery process to meet their business goals. 

Many of our customers transformed their CI/CD initiative by mastering the skills needed to scale deployments using Spinnaker CD pipelines with help from OpsMx support team. 

Read our blog “Top 4 Challenges for Broad Spinnaker Success” where we have identified and prioritized the most common challenges that you are likely to face with your Spinnaker adoption journey. Learn how to integrate Spinnaker with existing CI/CD toolchains like GitHub, Jenkins, Jira, Slack, Artfactory, Splunk and so on. 

Know how to go for broad Spinnaker adoption across your organisation, which deployment strategy to choose from Blue/Green, Canary, Rolling Update or Highlander, how to handle all governance, compliance and security issues, like secrets management, authentication, and authorization etc. Many of the Spinnaker users confronted the same anxiety that you may be having as you begin your Spinnaker rollout. 

At OpsMx, we helped them get past the initial Spinnaker struggles, made Spinnaker production ready and helped them realise unlimited benefits from Spinnaker adoption. To know more, read the blog now!

DevOps team is responsible for creating and continuously deploying software, and along with compliance managers, they have to ensure software adheres to all the policies. Otherwise, a small error or omission can have widespread consequences for an organization that can extend far beyond SDLC of their software applications.

Similarly, there are policies pertinent to deployments which the team needs to enforce to avoid compromise to business-critical applications. Examples of such policies are- time to deploy a release or patch, days in a week, or month for deployment activities to avoid IT unavailability, restrictions of deployments on servers in specific locations.