Industry On The Move: Google Cloud Integrates Spinnaker Into Platform

In 2019, Google Cloud has been busy rolling out new capabilities in order to improve its market share. This week, a new feature announced on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is aimed at helping developers.

What Did Google Cloud Announce?

On July 22, Google Cloud revealed that its platform now supports Spinnaker, a continuous delivery service. With the update, users can quickly create pipelines for continuous delivery in the platform.

Netflix developed Spinnaker and designed it to be compatible with Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure. The open source solution was released in 2015 and is used by organizations such as Box, Cisco, and Samsung. In fact, Google’s Chrome Ops Developer Experience relies on Spinnaker to enable safe and fast deployments.

“Getting a new Spinnaker instance up and running with Spinnaker for GCP was really simple,” said Ola Karlsson, SRE on the Chrome Ops Developer Experience team. “The solution takes care of the details of managing Spinnaker and still gives us the flexibility we need. We're now using it to manage our production and test Spinnaker installations.”

A blog published by Andrew Phillips, Google Cloud’s product manager, outlines the benefits of integrating Spinnaker into the platform. Essentially, organizations will now be able to broaden continuous delivery and continuous integration pipelines in a secure and compliant manner.

“Spinnaker for GCP comes with built-in deployment best practices that can be leveraged whether teams' resources (source code, artifacts, other build dependencies) are on-premises or in the cloud,” wrote Phillips. “Teams get the flexibility of building, testing, and deploying to Google-managed runtimes such as Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Google Compute Engine (GCE), or Google App Engine (GAE), as well as other clouds or on-prem deployment targets for hybrid and multi-cloud CD.”

One of the benefits of the integration is that many key processes on the GCP are now automated, including the configuration and maintenance of Spinnaker. This also simplifies the auditing and monitoring of deployments, and it improves security by restricting access to the Spinnaker installation.

Enterprises that were previously leveraging Spinnaker can easily migrate to Spinnaker for GCP. For those organizations new to Spinnaker, installation is just a few clicks, and users can quickly gain access to all of the main tools.

This is isn’t first time this year that Google Cloud expanded capabilities to simplify its platform. Earlier in 2019, Google Cloud introduced Anthos, a new platform that enabled multi-cloud accessibility.

What Does This Mean For The Enterprise?

In recent years, there has been an increased focus on leveraging continuous delivery capabilities in the development process. The idea is that this will improve efficiencies and reduce long-term risk.

However, as Google Cloud points out, developers are sometimes forced to spend more time enabling pipelines instead of actual programming. Spinnaker is seen as tool that can help with this process.

The meteoric rise of Spinnaker can be attributed to the fact that it’s been used by many major technology companies. In realm of the cloud, Spinnaker may not be as popular as Kubernetes, but it is just as critical.

This news serves as a reminder that continuous delivery is a growing aspect in development.

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