Jenkins vs Spinnaker Continuous Deployment

Jenkins vs Spinnaker: What are the differences?

Continuous delivery (CD) platforms help DevOps teams manage software releases in short cycles, ensuring they are delivered safely, reliably and quickly. The goal is to reduce the costs, time and associated risks connected to building, testing and delivering changes by enabling a more incremental and regular approach towards updating applications in production. I always get asked whether Spinnaker or Jenkins is the better CD platform.

Jenkins: An extendable open source continuous integration server. SImply put Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 1000 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.

Spinnaker: Multi-cloud continuous delivery platform for releasing software changes with high velocity and confidence. Created at Netflix, it has been vigorously tested in production by hundreds of teams over millions of deployments. It combines a powerful and flexible pipeline management system with integrations to the major cloud providers.

Jenkins belongs to "Continuous Integration" category of the tech stack, while Spinnaker can be primarily classified under "Continuous Deployment".

Jenkins and Spinnaker are both open source tools. Jenkins is still preferred among teams for its flexibility and extensive plugin support, but it falls short as a complete deployment tool, particularly for the cloud. Spinnaker, on the other hand, has a richer deployment model with a “master dashboard” and built-in support for major cloud providers.  

I do have a secret preference over Spinnaker especially within the GCP Platform on Kubernetes. But Jenkins i find is the more mature product of the two.

Here at DELIVERBI we are experts in both tools. Give us a call to discuss in more detail

Cheers

Shahed