Continuous Delivery with Spinnaker

Chapter 9. Declarative Continuous Delivery

Most of the topics in this book have been centered around an imperative methodology of continuous delivery: telling the system the steps to go through to reach a desired state. Declarative is another popular and powerful delivery methodology where the end state is described and the delivery tooling determines the steps to get there.

In this chapter, you’ll be introduced to the pros and cons of the declarative delivery methodology, why teams are interested in its adoption, and the competitive advantage it provides for your projects, as well as declarative capabilities that will be offered through Spinnaker. Note that the declarative effort as of this writing is in development and not generally available.

Imperative Versus Declarative Methodologies

Both imperative and declarative methodologies have their own advantages and disadvantages that should be considered based on your organization.

An imperative world has a shallow learning curve and you’re capable of iterating on a delivery pipeline that fits your workflow quickly. Unfortunately, this artisanal flexibility tends to break down through time and scale: as more projects and people are added, things will slowly begin to diverge and some delivery pipelines can stagnate behind the cutting-edge organizational practices. To add insult to injury, when an imperative workflow does something incorrectly, cleanup and failure recovery is often manual or imperatively defined as well, which can ...