Continuous Delivery with Spinnaker

Chapter 11. Adopting Spinnaker

A question we are often asked by individuals and companies after an initial evaluation of Spinnaker is how they can effectively onboard engineering teams, especially when doing so involves reevaluating established processes for software delivery.

Over the past four years, Spinnaker adoption within Netflix has gone from zero to deploying over 95% of all cloud-based infrastructure, but that success was by no means a given. A core tenet of the Netflix culture is that teams and individuals are free to solve problems and innovate as they see fit. You can thus think of Netflix Engineering as a vast collection of small startups. Each team is responsible for the full operational lifecycle of the services they develop, which includes selecting the tools they adopt and their release cadence. We couldn’t just dictate that teams had to abandon their existing deployment tooling and replace it with Spinnaker. We had to make Spinnaker irresistible.

Sharing a Continuous Delivery Platform

Here are some key features of Spinnaker that helped convince teams to try out and ultimately adopt Spinnaker:

Make best practices easy to use

Automated canary analysis drove many teams to evaluate and ultimately adopt Spinnaker. Prior to Spinnaker, teams came up with their own methods for leveraging the canary engine, and they were responsible for every step of the process: launching clusters, running the analysis, evaluating metrics, go/no go, tearing down clusters. Spinnaker democratized ...