Application User Guide

An application in Spinnaker is a construct that represents some service that you are going to deploy (typically a microservice). It includes:

• the pipelines that process the service through to deployment in production

• the infrastructure on which the service is run:

  • clusters
  • server groups
  • firewalls
  • load balancers

• canary configs

Important note about applications

When you first access a new instance of Spinnaker, you might notice that there are already several applications visible when you click the Applications tab. This happens if you install Spinnaker on an existing Kubernetes cluster, using the Kubernetes provider . These applications are derived from existing infrastructure.

Don’t delete any of them.

Also, don’t use any of them as applications in which to create pipelines or add further infrastructure. Instead, create new applications for your deployment pipelines.

What distinguishes one application from another?

By common practice, one application contains all of the above components for one microservice.

There is nothing in Spinnaker that enforces the level at which you divide up your services into applications, but it would be messy to put too much into one application, dealing not only with all the containers to bake, canary configs to manage, and so on, but also all the infrastructure.

For different reasons, you also don’t want to segregate different environments (dev, staging, prod) into different applications. In many cases you will have pipelines, which deploy into one environment, eventually trigger other pipelines that promote the same service into the next environment.

Next

Create An Application