Skipper is a lightweight tool that lets you discover Spring Boot applications and manage their lifecycle on multiple Cloud Platforms. You can use Skipper standalone or integrate it with Continuous Integration pipelines to help implement the practice of Continuous Deployment.
Skipper consists of a server application that exposes an HTTP API. A shell application provides easy-to-use commands to interact with the server. The server uses a relational database to store state. Documentation to call the HTTP API is available in the Part X, “REST API Guide”.
Applications in Skipper are bundled as packages that contain a templated configuration file and a default set of values that are used to fill in the template. You can override these defaults when installing or upgrading a package. Skipper provides a means to orchestrate the upgrade/rollback procedure of applications between different versions, taking the minimal set of actions to bring the system to the desired state.
Skipper’s design is influenced by a large number of projects in the Kubernetes ecosystem that perform resource templating and/or orchestration, hence the nautically inspired project name Skipper.
In particular, Helm's approach to present the user with a familiar apt-get or brew like installation experience was a big influence.