Continuous Delivery with Spinnaker

Chapter 2. Cloud Deployment Considerations

Whether starting a greenfield project or planning the migration of a complex distributed system to the cloud, choices made around how software is deployed and infrastructure architected have a material impact on an application’s robustness, security, and ability to scale. Scale here refers both to the traffic handled by applications and the growing number of engineers, teams, and services in an organization.

The previous chapter covered why continuous delivery can be beneficial to organizations. It also covered some practices to keep in mind as you think about continuous delivery in your organization. In this chapter, we will discuss fundamental considerations that your organization will need to solve in order to successfully deploy software to the cloud. Each of these areas needs to have a solution in your organization before you can choose a continuous delivery strategy. For each consideration, we will demonstrate the pitfalls and present the work that has been done in the community and at Netflix as a potential solution. You’ll learn what to consider before you set up a continuous delivery solution.

Credentials Management

The first thing to consider is how you will manage credentials within the cloud. As a wise meme once said, “the cloud is just someone else’s computer.” You should always be careful when storing sensitive data, but all the more so when using a rented slice of shared hardware.

Cloud provider identity and access management ...