Spinnaker vs Terraform

Essentially, use Terraform to set up your infrastructure and use Spinnaker to manage your deployments. You CAN use Terraform to accomplish Spinnaker tasks but it would require a lot of glue-code that is difficult to copy for other tasks. We see a lot of companies attempting to extend Terraform to do Spinnaker’s tasks when they can simply use Spinnaker.

Where Spinnaker Excels Over Terraform:

• AMI Creation
• Deployment strategies out of the box:
• Highlander
• Blue/Green (also called Red/Black)
• Custom
• Canary

Where Terraform Excels Over Spinnaker:

• Non-deployment related resource creation and management
• VPCs
• Route 53 entries
• Subnets
• S3 buckets
• SQS
• SNS
• Etc.
• One time creation of resources
• Large scale modification of resources
• Lambda
• Defining and managing your infrastructure as code

Source:
https://blog.armory.io/comparing-terraform-and-spinnaker/

Spinnaker

More of a deployment tool (rather than an infrastructure creation tool like terraform).
Spinnaker will be deploying updated VMs or Containers to an existing environment.
Instead of doing "hacky terraform" blue/green deploys (one, two) or having to write a buncha "glue code" (one).

Can deploy to AWS or Kubernetes

Pipelines made of Stages
Stages can be types [infra, external, testing, control flow]
Also support for Triggers, Notifications, Expressions, Version Control and Auditing.

Source:
https://www.spinnaker.io/publications/ebook/



Next Steps:

1. https://blog.armory.io/global-software-delivery-best-practices/
2. https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/how-we-build-code-at-netflix-c5d9bd727f15
3. https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/ami-creation-with-aminator-98d627ca37b0
4. https://nebula-plugins.github.io/