Comparing Spinnaker and Kubernetes in this way is somewhat unfair to both projects. The scale, scope, and magnitude of these technologies are different, but parallels can still be drawn.
Just like Kubernetes, Spinnaker is a technology that is battle tested, with Netflix using Spinnaker internally for continuous delivery. Like Kubernetes, Spinnaker is backed by some of the biggest names in the industry, which helps breed confidence among users. Most importantly, though, both projects are open source, designed to build a diverse and inclusive ecosystem around them.
Frankenstein’s Monster
Continuous Delivery (CD) is a solved problem, but it has been a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster, with companies trying to build their own creations by stitching parts together, along with Jenkins. “We tried to build a lot of custom continuous delivery tooling, but they all fell short of our expectation,” said Brandon Leach, Sr. Manager of Platform Engineering at Lookout.
“We were using Jenkins along with tools like Rundeck, but both had their own set of problems. While Rundeck didn’t have a first-class deployment tool, Jenkins was becoming a nightmare and we ended up moving to Gitlabs,” said Gard Voigt Rimestad of Schibsted, a major Norwegian media group.
Netflix created a more elegant way for continuous delivery called Asgard, open sourced in 2012, which was designed to run Netflix’s own workload on AWS. Many companies were using Asgard, including Schibsted, and it was gaining momentum. But it was tied closely to the kind of workload Netflix was running with AWS. Bigger companies who liked Asgard forked it to run their own workloads. IBM forked it twice to make it work with Docker containers.
IBM’s forking of Asgard was an eye-opening experience for Netflix. At that point, Netflix had started looking into containerized workloads, and IBM showed how it could be done with Asgard.
Google was also planning to fork Asgard to make it work on Google Compute Engine. By that time, Netflix had started working on the successor to Asgard, called Spinnaker. “Before Google could fork the project, we managed to convince Google to collaborate on Spinnaker instead of forking Asgard. Pivotal also joined in,” said Andy Glover, shepherd of Spinnaker and Director of Delivery Engineering at Netflix. The rest is history.
Continuous popularity
There are many factors at play that contribute to the popularity and adoption of Spinnaker. First and foremost, it’s a proven technology that’s been used at Netflix. It instills confidence in users. “Spinnaker is the way Netflix deploys its services. They do things at the scale we don’t do in AWS. That was compelling,” said Leach.
The second factor is the powerful community around Spinnaker that includes heavyweights like Microsoft, Google, and Netflix. “These companies have engineers on their staff that are dedicated to working on Spinnaker,” added Leach.
Governance
In October 2018, the Spinnaker community organized its first official Spinnaker Summit in Seattle. During the Summit, the community announced the governance structure for the project.
“Initially, there will be a steering committee and a technical oversight committee. At the moment Google and Netflix are steering the governance body, but we would like to see more diversity,” said Steven Kim, Google’s Software Engineering Manager who leads the Google team that works on Spinnaker. The broader community is organized around a set of special interest groups (SIGs) that enable users to focus on particular areas of interest.
“There are users who have deployed Spinnaker in their environment, but they are often intimidated by two big players like Google and Netflix. The governance structure will enable everyone to be able to have a voice in the community,” said Kim.
At the moment, the project is being run by Google and Netflix, but eventually, it may be donated to an organization that has a better infrastructure for managing such projects. “It could be the OpenStack Foundation, CNCF, or the Apache Foundation,” said Boris Renski, Co-founder and CMO of Mirantis.
I met with more than a dozen users at the Summit, and they were extremely bullish about Spinnaker. Companies are already using it in a way even Netflix didn’t envision. Since continuous delivery is at the heart of multi-cloud strategy, Spinnaker is slowly but steadily starting to beat at the heart of many companies.
Spinnaker might not become as big as Kubernetes, due to its scope, but it’s certainly becoming as important. Spinnaker has made some bold promises, and I am sure it will continue to deliver on them.
