Continuous Delivery with Spinnaker

Chapter 4. Structuring Deployments as Pipelines

In this chapter you’ll learn about the benefits of structuring your deployments out of customizable pieces, the parts of a Spinnaker pipeline, and how codifying and iterating on your pipeline can help reduce the cognitive load of developers. At the end of this chapter, you should be able to look at a deployment process and break down different integration points into specific pipeline parts.

Benefits of Flexible User-Defined Pipelines

Most deployments consist of similar steps. In many cases, the code must be built and packaged, deployed to a test environment, tested, and then deployed to production. Each team, however, may choose to do this a little differently. Some teams conduct functional testing by hand whereas others might start with automated tests. Some environments are highly controlled and need to be gated with an approval by a person (manual judgment), whereas others can be updated automatically whenever there is a new change.

At Netflix, we’ve found that allowing each team to build and maintain their own deployment pipeline from the building blocks we provide lets engineers experiment freely according to their needs. Each team doesn’t have to develop and maintain their own way to do common actions (e.g., triggering a CI build, figuring out which image is deployed in a test environment, or deploying a new server group) because we provide well-tested building blocks to do this. Additionally, these building blocks work for ...