DevOps Dictionary

Spinnaker is an open-source continuous delivery platform that orchestrates deployment pipelines across Kubernetes and major cloud providers. It replaces fragile, script-heavy release processes by promoting a versioned artifact (for example, a container image) through environments and coordinating the steps needed to ship safely, such as automated validations, gradual rollouts, traffic shifting, and optional manual approvals. At a high level, Spinnaker provides a repeatable pipeline that deploys the same build consistently and supports common strategies like blue-green deployments (switching traffic from old to new) and canary releases (sending a small portion of traffic to a new version while monitoring).

With Spinnaker, deployments are visible, auditable, and consistent, while without it teams often rely on bespoke automation and manual coordination that increases variance, slows recovery, and raises outage risk. This gap exists because a centralized pipeline applies the same rollout mechanics and safety checks every time, regardless of who triggers the release.