Question: What is spinnaker used for?

Answer: For continuous deployment of applications on cloud, one could use custom scripts. These quickly become complex and requirements grow to include "controls", specifically "who" is allowed to deploy to production. Then comes monitoring the application post deployment for some time to ensure that the updated does perform as good as the previous ones. Then as different application pipelines demand different artifiacts, interfaces, environments, the scripts soon become either difficult to maintain, buggy or highly depended on expertise of few individuals. More over, once there is a need for another cloud provider, lot of rework is required.

An alternative to custom scripts is Spinnaker, a battle-tested deployment tool for multi-cloud deployments.\

Spinnaker is a tool used for “Application Management” and “Application Deployment” targeted towards cloud services. For application management, spinnaker uses concepts like “Applications”, Loadbalancers, “Clusters” and “Server Groups” to describe and group deployed services. Spinnaker comes inbuilt interfaces for a vast array of CI tools, Artifact repositories, docker image repositories and various cloud providers including AWS, GCP, Azure, PCF, Openshift and various flavors of Kubernetes.