One Spot for K8s application delivery and CloudOps: Introducing Ocean CD

The widespread adoption of Kubernetes has made it table stakes for the modern cloud native stack. Software is now being purpose-built for Kubernetes, and as companies enter this new phase of their cloud journey, they are looking to scale this cloud native, Kubernetes-first model.

Building upon years of experience with Kubernetes, Spot by NetApp is continuously innovating to bring new ways to help customers achieve this goal. 

Automated, container-optimized infrastructure is already made possible and easy with Spot’s Ocean. With a core serverless engine, Ocean frees DevOps from the manual burden of infrastructure operations by providing automated provisioning, scaling and optimization of cloud resources. 

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re extending Ocean’s coverage of Kubernetes to application delivery with Ocean for Continuous Delivery and evolving Spot Ocean into a suite of DevOps solutions.

Shifting Right & Shifting Left, at the same time

As a unified toolset purpose-built for Kubernetes, Spot Ocean brings cloud operations together with software deployment. Connecting these dots in a single place brings intelligence to both that can vastly improve the efficiency and manageability of Kubernetes applications and environments. 

Introducing Ocean CD: Continuous Delivery as a Service

Kubernetes brought a new working environment where developers can release their software hundreds of times a day, but the tools and processes that support delivery at this scale can become complex and inefficient. As release frequency increases, it becomes more difficult to ensure stability and service quality. With no standardization of CD processes, the effort and time required from DevOps for routine maintenance becomes a bottleneck to delivery, while deployments are a black box to developers. Even as organizations build robust tool stacks that include multiple 3rd party products and homemade solutions, they are still struggling to solve these challenges and not achieving the speed, scale and agility they truly could be. 

Less tools, more extensions to Kubernetes

The popular market paradigm maintains continuous delivery tooling as separate from Kubernetes. Spot by NetApp is rethinking this approach and extending the capabilities of Kubernetes to continuous delivery with Ocean CD. As a Kubernetes-native solution, Ocean CD focuses on the most painful aspects of modern application delivery by automating mission critical deployment and verification processes. With Ocean CD, developers have the freedom to push code with confidence while DevOps easily maintain governance and SLOs. 

Deliver Kubernetes applications 10x faster with confidence

Instead of custom pipelines and manual scripts, Ocean CD provides complete deployment and verification automation in one fully managed solution. DevOps and software developers can have high confidence in deployment reliability as Ocean CD controls and validates deployments, and rolls back when necessary, so code can gracefully deploy into production. 

Overhead of release management is significantly reduced with Ocean CD’s out-of-the box progressive delivery strategies that make it easy for users to quickly execute deployments. The CD process is no longer a black box to developers who have visibility across all delivery phases. Together with Ocean, users have container-driven infrastructure that auto scales to meet application requirements throughout the deployment process, delivering significant optimization for cloud infrastructure operations and costs.

Application delivery with Ocean CD

Ocean CD’s key features are designed to address unsolved problems and common CD challenges, from complex installations that require manual work to dependencies between DevOps and developers. By reimagining continuous delivery to meet the requirements of modern organizations, Ocean CD is able to deliver an end-to-end solution that covers the vast spectrum of needs that emerge during the application release lifecycle. 

Out-of-the-box progressive delivery strategies

Existing solutions–either homegrown, 3rd party tools or both–require the user to take too many manual steps. As an out-of-the-box solution, Ocean CD is providing progressive deployment strategies like canary and blue/green that are easy to define, automate and customize. Developers commit code, use any CI tool and Ocean CD detects the deployment, automatically initiating its assigned rollout strategy and DevOps policies.

Real-time and historical deployment visibility

Having visibility into deployments and pipelines is key to building stable, scalable release processes, but up until this point, CD has often been a black box to developers, and even DevOps. Without this transparency, it’s impossible to have full confidence in your deployments. Ocean CD is giving users a single place to observe deployment data with detailed dashboards that show real-time progress and historical analysis. Having this information at their fingertips will help developers and DevOps to better understand their deployments, tackle issues quickly and improve future outcomes. 

Continuous verification automation and intelligence

Another key aspect of ensuring the stability and quality of deployments is continuous verification. As release frequency grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to make sure deployments behave as you expect and fulfill organizational SLOs. Routine verifications of deployments, based on metrics received from your own monitoring tools and comparisons with baseline versions, are conducted automatically by Ocean CD. 

Automatic rollback

Ocean CD monitors the entire deployment process, and when issues are detected, rollback is initiated to safely handle unhealthy deployments and infrastructure is automatically tuned to meet changing requirements. Using the metrics collected during and after deployment and verification processes, Ocean CD applies intelligence to optimize future application deployments. 

How it works

Ocean CD’s architecture, together with its strong API, enables a simple and secured installation across multiple clusters and seamlessly fits into any existing environment. CI pipelines, Jenkins jobs and other events before deployment to the cluster remain in place and untouched. With just a few commands and simple scripts, DevOps engineers can install the two main components of Ocean CD.

The Ocean CD controller detects newly applied changes in your Kubernetes cluster and automatically executes rollout of deployments. Through Ocean CD’s SaaS interface, users can easily set services and rollout definitions to enable full automation of progressive strategies, continuous verifications and rollback, while observing and tracking the entire deployment process. 

Getting started with Ocean CD

Ocean CD is the first Kubernetes continuous delivery product that gives developers the freedom to release while providing DevOps and SREs the peace of mind of maintaining governance and service level objectives (SLOs). Join us for the Ocean CD private preview.