Digital.ai Release vs. Spinnaker

XL release fits very well when you need cross-team coordination in a release process where you want to coordinate an alpha or beta program with marketing as part of a major release process.

Incentivized

Spinnaker is a strong solution for Continuous Deployment being able to manage enormous environments in an easy way. Even Spinnaker being able to manage environments based on cloud instances (ec2 for example) I believe it is more suitable for containerized environments. Mainly in Kubernetes where it excels as a reliable and safe tool

Incentivized

• Cross-team release workflow control using email, texts, scripts allow our release management to be truly a 360 process.
• XL Release allowing our Jenkins toolchain to control the beginning of release trains which is very powerful.
• XL release allows us to expose the business process flow for anyone to read direct at the source which runs the process instead of a separate vision.

Incentivized

• The immutable way of deployment is one of its greatest advantages.
• We have a strict policy to restock our instances with new images very frequently and this can be done very seamlessly via Spinnaker
• Rollback/ resize of clusters is one of the coolest features of Spinnaker.

Incentivized

• Pagination of data - across tool.
• User Roles Management API can be improved.
• Case insensitive ID's are treated differently making user face login and access issues.
• Dependency on Universal template/custom plugins creation should be reduced.
• Code versioning of templates is very difficult.
• Better error handling.
• Futures Timeout Issues.

Incentivized

• Integration with external authentication mechanism is not that simple.
• Its configuration is made by a external tool (halyard). Would be better if we could configure it by using its own frontend.
• Its user interface is some times a bit confusing.

Incentivized

The tool is easy to use, easy to navigate and learn. Manages releases with proper approvals in a systematic manner. Though it needs minor improvements in terms of pagination (data loading), access management, but, overall the tool helps in increasing productivity and less time for production deployments.

Incentivized

Support is not good at all. To this day, I have to mail my queries and their support site does not log in for me (me alone). But, upon contacting many times, no one helps with a proper response. Though good thing is, I get a proper response over mail too. But, being informative about the tool and not on the issues faced by users outside of the process to get support should also be addressed equally. Which is currently missing in support.

Incentivized

Deployment and release management can be done in various ways. But, XL Release or Digita.ai, helps in simplifying the process with predefined plugins, pre-developed security features, etc that help manage and process deployment cycles quicker and in a processed way.

Incentivized

• Pipeline Expressiveness • Self-Service/Override • Visibility of Client Teams • Operability of Client Teams - • High-Quality Integrations (AWS, IHP, Google) • Extensibility – (Ability to add code) • The maturity of Deployment Process • Speed/Ease of Onboarding

Incentivized

• Positive - Faster deployments.
• Positive - Better tracking on progress of each release.
• Negative - Data once goes beyond a limit, pagination and data load take a toll on users.
• Positive - Dashboard can be customizable.

Incentivized

• It's open source!
• RPM based deployments can be scripted at Maven file itself , so very easy!
• RPM based deployments bundles all code and configs together, so awesome!

Incentivized