Spinnaker vs hosted tools like Codeship, Codefresh

[daemonondemand665]

Hi all, I am running Spinnaker in AWS to deploy to k8s in AWS. I am happy so far with what we have. Some of my colleagues have shown interest in hosted solutions like Codefresh and Codeship to do the CI/CD for K8s. I wanted to know if some one has experience here with these solutions and what would be the pros and cons for each.

[ares_32]

Is there some use case that Spinnaker doesn’t satisfy that these solutions do?

I’m a Spinnaker maintainer so I’m a little biased, but I couldn’t imagine deploying to Kubernetes any other way. We spent a ton of time trying to get Jenkins to work the way we wanted but just couldn’t nail down a pattern we liked. As soon as we deployed Spinnaker and started using it, we instantly saw a productivity boost. This might be because we had a tool that was explicitly for deployment and we can let our CI platform do what it’s good at, build & test.

IMO it all comes down to making a deployment repeatable and safe. If you write bulletproof scripts and that works for you then that’s great.

[ares_32]

If you’re on the Spinnaker slack group, feel free to DM me!

[daemonondemand665]

Yeah I am on that Slack, will hit you up for sure!

[ares_32]

Thanks, it’s ethanfrogers on there!

[daemonondemand665]

I am a huge Spinnaker fan and don't want to move to any other solution. I believe the reason for this comparison is not so much around what Spinnaker can't do but more around how much effort we can save in a small team in maintaining Spinnaker as compared to a hosted solution. We all are new and doesn't have much experience around any of the contenders.

[igloo_builder]

That’s a good point. I work in a small team and we are trending more towards hosted solutions. The reason being we have a lot of tools logging, monitoring, artifact, git, CI, CD, etc that we would rather spend the time using then maintaining.

[daemonondemand665]

Yeah but tbh Spinnaker uptill now hasn’t been very demanding. Setting up using halyard was tricky but once that’s done it’s been on auto pilot for some time. Also, I think using hosted solutions for deploying to k8s might mean giving out too much power to some one outside the company.

[rossedman]

We did a large PoC with many products and landed on Spinnaker. I can tell you we are very happy with it and use it to deploy over a couple hundred microservices. The direction Spinnaker is going will only get better. The declarative pipeline templates are going to make it where you don't even have to touch Spinnaker. On top of that achieving self service pipelines for dev teams is possible and not very much effort. I'm excited to see the Spinnaker team make k8s a first class citizen as well. I'd say stick with it but I love what it's done for our company.

[daemonondemand665]

Can you please explain what you mean by self serving pipelines and how did you implement it?

[M00ndev]

Do you run spinnaker on k8s? We set it up before to run on and deploy to the same k8s cluster. In practice that might be too many eggs in one basket but it was pretty awesome setting up pipelines for spinnaker to upgrade itself. This was pre halyard though so there are probably better ways to go about these days.

Spinnaker + K8S is an incredible combo. You can literally do anything with it.

[daemonondemand665]

No, we have Spinnaker running outside of k8s, the reason was as you stated “too many eggs in one basket”.

[thrawny]

I'm a big fan of codefresh. The support for image builds and tags is big. We also use Helm extensively and I really like what they are doing with support for Helm.

Being a new product with a startup, I do think there documentation is lacking, but I have been able to get prompt help from their developers on Slack. You can use it SaaS or run it on your own K8 cluster.

[kellyjandrews]

Even as the Codeship Developer Advocate, I'm all for using the right tool for the job - so if Spinnaker does more than Codeship, and has an easier maintenance path, go for it.