Overview

Spinnaker is an open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform for releasing software changes with high velocity and confidence.

If you would like to learn more about Spinnaker, please visit the Spinnaker website.

About Spinnaker for Google Cloud Platform

This solution installs a single instance of Spinnaker onto a GKE cluster in a production-ready configuration. The installation follows recommended practices for running Spinnaker on Google Cloud Platform, and is integrated with related Google Cloud services, such as Cloud Build.

This solution also provides a simplified configuration experience, as well as a management environment and workflow for ongoing administration of Spinnaker.

Architecture

Spinnaker is composed of a number of individual microservices. These will be deployed in their own Kubernetes Pods, managed by Deployment objects, behind Service objects.

Management components

We provide the following two components to help you manage your Spinnaker instance:

Halyard is Spinnaker's configuration service and consists of a CLI and a daemon. The CLI will be installed in the management environment (based on Cloud Shell) included in this solution. The daemon will be installed in a Pod managed by a StatefulSet object.

Spin is Spinnaker's CLI. It is also available in the management environment.

Network access to Spinnaker

As a safe default, the Spinnaker instance is not exposed to external traffic. It's accessed via port fowarding, which can be set up with with a single command from the management environment.

Alternatively, the management environment allows you to expose Spinnaker via the Identity-Aware Proxy, using a secure domain.

Installation

Quick install via the management environment

Use the management environment, based on Cloud Shell, to perform the installation.

Prerequisites

Set up command line tools

The management environment has all the required tools pre-installed.

Create a Google Kubernetes Engine cluster

By default, the installation process creates a new GKE cluster for your Spinnaker instance. To use an existing cluster, you must ensure that it has:

• IP aliases enabled (since we are using a Cloud Memorystore for Redis instance)
• Full Cloud Platform scope for its nodes (if using the default service account)

Install Spinnaker for Google Cloud Platform

When you click on the "Open in Google Cloud Shell" button above, the management environment asks you to copy/paste and execute a number of commands. Click to copy/paste, then press Enter to execute.

As part of this process, a properties file is generated. You can modify the values in the generated properties file to fine-tune your configuration before launching the actual setup script.

When the initial installation process completes, additional commands will be shown to allow you to:

• find your Spinnaker installation in the GKE Applications view
• access Spinnaker via port-forwarding
• expose Spinnaker securely using IAP
• allow others to administer and/or access Spinnaker

and more.

Ongoing management of Spinnaker

To manage your installed Spinnaker instance:

• Locate your Spinnaker installation by navigating to the newly-registered Application in the GKE Applications view.
• Click the link from the Spinnaker Application to open the management environment in Cloud Shell, and update it by cloning this repo
• make sure you're connected to the GKE cluster containing the Spinnaker instance you want to manage.
• Update your configuration by pulling the config from the Spinnaker instance into your management environment.
• Update the management environment interface to reflect your updated configuration.
• Make all of your changes using hal in Cloud Shell, using the commands provided by the management environment, or by entering commands directly. hal will validate and apply your changes.
• Push the updated configuration to your Spinnaker instance. The configuration is automatically backed up to GCS as part of this process.
• Apply your changes to the Spinnaker instance

Scripts are provided for each of these steps, and copy/paste commands and instructions are rendered in the management environment in the Cloud Shell tutorial pane.

This approach allows an administrator to manage multiple Spinnaker instances from the same management environment. The source of truth for each instance is always the instance itself, with a secure backup in Google Cloud Storage.

This makes it easy for multiple admins, each with their own management environment, to administer many Spinnaker instances.