Spinnaker Clouddriver 500 error in CI

By Kaveh Alemi·Latchkey

Clouddriver is the Spinnaker service that performs cloud operations and caching. A 500 from it means the request reached Clouddriver but it failed internally, often on a provider credential, a bad cache read, or an unreachable cloud API.

What this error means

Gate/Deck or a stage surfaces "500" from clouddriver, or the execution shows "clouddriver ... Internal Server Error" while other services respond normally.

Error submitting task to clouddriver:
status 500 reading Clouddriver#deploy(...);
com.netflix.spinnaker.clouddriver.exceptions.OperationException

Common causes

A provider account credential is invalid or expired

Clouddriver cannot authenticate to the cloud provider, so the operation throws internally and returns 500.

The provider API call or cache read failed

A throttled provider API, a stale infra cache, or a Redis backing store issue can make Clouddriver error internally.

How to fix it

Check Clouddriver logs and the account

1. Read the Clouddriver pod/service logs for the stack trace behind the 500.
2. Confirm the referenced provider account credentials are valid.
3. Re-run the operation once the credential or provider call is fixed.

Validate the account with Halyard

Confirm the provider account is configured and reachable, then apply so Clouddriver picks up valid credentials.

hal config provider kubernetes account get my-k8s-account
hal deploy apply

How to prevent it

• Rotate provider credentials before they expire.
• Monitor Clouddriver error rates and provider API throttling.
• Keep Redis/cache backing stores healthy and sized.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

References

• Terraform documentation
• GitHub Actions documentation