Spinnaker is currently one of the top CI/CD tools and is moving steadily forward, but because I’m currently happy with CircleCI I have not spent much time checking out what Spinnaker can give.
After 40, in my opinion pretty boring, minutes with Jenkins, which is not on the top of my attention list in 2019, I can at least give it that is still somewhat alive, and I noted that after all years it finally got the feature Configuration as Code that I soo badly needed in 2013. After half-sleeping through the first Jenkins seminar, there was another session on jenkins-x that captured some of my interest. Seemed cool if your use case is to simplify stuff like cluster creation across different cloud providers.
Tekton is a very new and cool CI/CD project, and was referred to many times. Tekton originates from Knative Build. Knative is a platform for providing portable serverless functionality using Kubernetes as its engine. Tekton has a potential of standardizing future pipelines. I’ll keep my eyes open for Tekton in the future.
Currently CircleCI as a service is still what I prefer today when it comes down to business and getting the job done.
Two tools got my attention, solving problems related to security/compliance:
Grafeas/kritis (https://github.com/grafeas/kritis), an interesting software supply chain for Kubernetes. It helps identifying and stopping vulnerabilities in packages to reach production
Open Policy Agent (https://www.openpolicyagent.org/docs/latest/kubernetes-admission-control) is used to apply policies on Kubernetes configurations. An example of that is to detect and stop Containers running as root to be deployed in production
There was a BOF about future of CD/CD with people from Google, Cloudbees, CircleCI, Gitlab and Pivotal.
What is coming in the CI/CD space?
- Organizations are off-loading more and more work to CI/CD providers. You don’t have to spend time building your own pipeline and deploy tools anymore
- More advanced deployment techniques like canary deploys and blue/green deployment gets ”democratized” because the tools now support it. Before only companies like Facebook could afford it
- This year Service Mesh is probably the top topic on the whole conference, and service mesh platforms like Linkerd and Istio are examples of tools giving us these more advanced deployment techniques today
What what can customers do to that will provide the most value in the CI/CD space from where most are standing now?
Minimize the cycle time all the way from the idea or specification to production. A nicely working deployment pipeline is certainly useful but is only a small part and pretty far back in the chain from idea to production.
Summary
Continuous Delivery is still valuable and important, the tools are very good now and are getting even better, but apart from that, all organizations are not yet there, and it is still not uncommon to face resistence when trying to change the culture of organizations to move in that direction.
