Declarative provisioning of AWS resources with Spinnaker and Crossplane

In a previous blog post, we discussed how GitOps, declarative definition of infrastructure and application resources, and using technologies such as AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) and Crossplane have enabled DevOps engineers to reduce complexity and improve visibility into infrastructure rollout and application resources.

For small- and medium-sized cloud native companies, switching to a new GitOps model that takes advantage of modern GitOps tooling—such as Argo CD or Flux CD—is a relatively small barrier to entry. For bigger enterprises, however, with established CI/CD automations in place, transitioning away from their reliable mechanisms of rolling out software may not be as trivial. This is where modernization and enhancements to their existing CI/CD platforms would allow for more easily embracing newer technologies.

One of these battle-tested CI/CD platforms heavily used by some of our enterprise-grade strategic customers—such as Netflix, Autodesk, Airbnb, Salesforce, Pinterest, and Snap—is Spinnaker. In a recent blog post, we discussed the collaboration between Netflix and AWS in enabling GitOps for the Spinnaker community via enhancements done for Managed Delivery and its respective Spinnaker microservice, Keel. The intentions behind supporting managed delivery in Spinnaker are to make it easier for Spinnaker users to embrace GitOps with little to no interruption to their existing software rollout strategies. Also, to provide higher-level abstractions for defining software rollout strategies that would abstract away lower-level infrastructure complexities and allow Spinnaker users to move faster and leaner when it comes to deploying software.

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